Design notes: Tiny Grotesk
Tiny Grotesk is a tiny superfamily. In a market where sans-serif families quickly grow to contain dozens of styles, sometimes over a hundred, Tiny Grotesk is an antidote, a proposal to do more with less.
Tiny Grotesk is in its regular width a clean, friendly neogrotesk with relaxed capitals and a round, even-keeled lowercase. The two accompanying widths, Narrow and Wide, expand it into a complex typographic toolkit. The Narrow styles, space-saving and optimised for small use, are ideal for footnotes, asides and UI elements. The Wide styles, imposing and optimised for large use, demand space, and will take it no matter what. This pairing makes the family versatile and broadly usable while remaining as compact as possible.
Tiny Grotesk has been in development since 2019, slowly but steadily expanding in scope but never in size. It has been used in a few print projects, on some vinyl records, and for a complex digital catalogue before its release in 2024.
The three widths are designed for different use sizes. There is a natural and optimised structure. The Narrow styles are used as footnotes, sidenotes and other typographic metatextual elements. The Regular widths are the general-purpose neogrotesk, ready for running text from 10 to 20 points. Then, for large and eye-catching use, such as headlines, logos and quotes, the Wide styles can go as big as you want. But nobody’s going to stop you if you mix things up.
Tiny Grotesk is as compact a neogrotesk superfamily as it can be, and provides a genuinely useful wide range of functions with only twelve styles. Despite being designed as a holistic family, the subfamilies do stand on their own, and each covers the exact same typographic and linguistic features.