Typography serves language, not the convenience of a system.

For many designers, typography is a first love. In the pages of design books and type manuals, the environment feels steady. Columns, baselines, and margins hold firm. Letterforms lock into place, and paragraphs stay within their bounds.

The web plays by different rules. Sentences wrap unpredictably, and paragraphs break in unexpected places. To restore order, designers often reach for systemized solutions like 4px grids or component libraries. Design tools reinforce this reflex, rewarding what is easy to measure with neat numbers.

But typography has always lived beyond measurement. It rests on the eye: human perception, balance, and the subtle adjustments that quick calculations can't account for. Reduced to digital conveniences, these nuances are often lost, and with them the legibility typography is meant to sustain.

That gap between what typography needs and what these abstracted systems offer is where our work began. This is the story of how we designed Atlas, a type system for Adaline.