Type scale

The fixed menu of type sizes a design allows itself. Chosen once, obeyed everywhere, felt as coherence.

A type scale is the modular scale put to work: the handful of sizes, often five to eight, that every text on every surface must choose among. Its power is negative, all the sizes that cannot exist, because arbitrary sizes are how layouts drift into disagreement with themselves.

In practice the scale lives as tokens: named steps, caption through display, wired into the code so obedience is the path of least resistance. Our pages clamp each step between minimum and maximum so the whole scale breathes with the viewport while relationships hold. A new size is a design decision, not a Tuesday adjustment.