Industry: Design

Typeface Family for Print, Web, Signage, and UI

Sans-serif shaped by ophthalmology lab testing

Zed Text is a sans-serif typeface family from Typotheque with accessibility and inclusivity as primary design goals. Peter Biľak designed the Latin and Armenian scripts; Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian, Hebrew, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean were each developed by dedicated native-script designers. Letter proportions were informed by acuity tests conducted at the National Centre of Ophthalmology in Paris, where the typeface was tested against Helvetica with visually impaired patients. The family includes separate optical text and display versions, Braille characters in its glyph set, and a companion icon set. It received a Gold European Design Award in 2024.

Set in Zed Text

Insights

Acuity tests at the National Centre of Ophthalmology in Paris directly compared Zed Text with Helvetica across hospital patient groups to determine letter proportions; the foundry reports Zed Text outperformed Helvetica in reading speed.
The family separates text and display optical versions rather than adapting a single design across size ranges.
Braille was incorporated into the glyph set alongside visual characters, requiring a distinct design process reviewed against regional Braille standards.
The Zed system is conceived across five design dimensions — weight, width, skew, corner rounding, and optical size — applied to the broader type family.