Panic Website

The website of Panic, makers of “shockingly good software”, uses Colfax, a contemporary sans-serif typeface by Process that was picked as one of Typographica’s Typefaces of 2012. Panic seems to have been an early adopter, since the fonts are still referenced under their original name, Chrono, which soon after the release had to be changed.

While a lot of attention has been paid to nice effects like routed type (‘bright shadow’ on dark background, via CSS3’s text-shadow property) and even text filled with color gradients, there is room for typographic improvement: Justified text simply doesn’t work without hyphenation, certainly not in combination with narrow colums as seen on the product pages. For some reason, Colfax is not (yet?) used on the pages for Transmit and Unison – those are still in Neue Helvetica. As the site occasionally exhibits correct apostrophes, the many straight ones can’t be excused as a conscious style decision.

The logo is set in a bold oblique Futura – probably the version by Adobe or Linotype, which better should be avoided: With their egg-shaped glyphs, they lead the whole idea of a geometric typeface ad adsurdum. To add insult to injury, the curves in the logo appear to be clipped at the top and the right.