System stack was the floor; this is the intended pairing. Three roles, three
voices:
- Archivo Black (display) — the big confident archive voice. CANARIES,
TRAP TRIPPED, DOSSIER NOT FOUND, SPECIMEN ISSUED, NO SPECIMEN HERE. Single
weight 900 black grotesque, wide letterforms, built for huge display. Pairs
visually with the PARADISE-style pixelated typography in the
vector-minimalism reference folder.
- Space Grotesk (sans) — speaking voice. Body, section titles, blurbs,
button labels, error text. Geometric joints + open apertures read as
"designed" where system extra-bold read as "just heavy." Weights 400-700
cover the range; section titles dropped 800→700 since Space Grotesk caps
at 700 (no perceptible difference in the design).
- Departure Mono (mono) — technical scribblings. SerialBar, timestamps,
field labels, strip pills, ID codes, all the spec-sheet micro-text. Its
pixelated character is the deliberate echo of image 1 (PARADISE) that
ui-monospace can't make.
Loaded via Google Fonts <link> in index.html (preconnect + display=swap),
no npm dep. ~50KB cold cache; cached-warm thereafter. System sans / system
mono remain in the fallback chain at the end of each stack so a CDN miss
degrades to the previous design without breaking.
$font-display token added to _fonts.scss for the giant headlines; $font-sans
and $font-mono updated to lead with the new families. Headlines previously at
font-weight: 900 dropped the weight (Archivo Black is single-weight), and
letter-spacing/line-height tightened slightly to match the new metrics.
Gates green: typecheck + biome + lint:scss + build (419ms; no chunk size
delta — fonts load from CDN, not the bundle).