Typography
Accepted
Museo Sans is the first choice in all Aleris communication, with Arial as the fallback where Museo Sans is not available.
- 2xl
- xl
- lg
- md
- base
- sm
- xs
Why it looks like this
Museo Sans is geometric and pared back, with soft, rounded forms, so it is precise and warm at once. It signals that we know what we are doing and that we care about who we are talking to. Arial stands in where Museo Sans is not available, such as PowerPoint and Word: it does not have the same character, but it keeps the tone and the legibility.
The typeface and the principles stay the same everywhere: a clear hierarchy, the accessibility floor, sentence case and at least 8pt between text levels. The scale, the line spacing and the balance of weights change with the medium.
What never changes
Only Museo Sans, or Arial as the fallback
Another typeface makes a surface look like something other than Aleris.
Sentence case throughout, never all caps
This covers headings, buttons, navigation and labels. Abbreviations such as MRI and AB are outside the rule.
No text below 14px
The audience includes patients with reduced vision and stressed readers.
Museo Sans is never set at weight 400
The typeface has no 400 weight, so the browser synthesises one. Use regular (500) or bold (700).
No italics for emphasis
Italics in Museo Sans barely stand out from regular, especially at small sizes. Use bold (700) instead.
How to apply it
Digital
Digital work uses a perfect-fifth scale, a ratio of 1.5, anchored on 18px body text and running from 14px for captions to 60px for the largest heading.
Use the typography tokens in aleris-tokens.css rather than setting pixel sizes, and use the lead style once per section, straight after the heading.
A printed patient brochure can have a different base size and line spacing to suit the paper. The typeface, the hierarchy and the accessibility floor stay the same.
Presentations
In PowerPoint, Word and other Office files, set the text in Arial: regular 400 for body text and bold 700 for headings.
The values
| Token | Value | Used for |
|---|---|---|
--font-weight-light | 300 | Large display text on communicative surfaces |
--font-weight-regular | 500 | Body text, labels, buttons, UI chrome |
--font-weight-bold | 700 | Headings, emphasis, CTAs |
--font-weight-black | 900 | Almost never |
What good looks like
Do
Two text levels at least 8pt apart
The step between them reads as a deliberate choice.
Don't
Two sizes that are nearly alike
Closer than 8pt, the difference looks like a mistake, so merge them into one level.
Do
Bold for emphasis
Bold (700) has the contrast against regular that italics lack.
Don't
Italics for emphasis
In Museo Sans, italics are barely noticeable against regular.
Do
A word, or an arrow icon
The text stays in one typeface.
Don't
An arrow or check mark character in running text
Museo Sans has neither glyph, so the character silently falls back to another typeface with a different weight and baseline.
Asked about typography
- What font do I use in PowerPoint or Word, when almost nobody has Museo Sans installed?
- We need an expressive headline, like "thank you for a wonderful year" — which typeface do we use?
Creating with typography
How it is checked
- No literal font-size below the 14px floor
- Surface temperature does not reach the type scale
- Letter-spacing roles match the composites that consume them
- Who may load the fonts
- The server sends the header it computes
Read from data-products/tokens/tokens.test.ts, lib/font-cors.test.ts at build.
Source and status
Accepted
- Last verified
- 2026-08-11
- Owner
- Not recorded
- Depends on
- Nothing declared
- Read by agents as
- /explore/typography.md
principles/typography.mdAcceptedconstitutional/typography-is-museo-sans.mdAccepteddata-products/tokens/aleris-fonts.cssbaseline/BASELINE.mdAccepted