North Water Editions
The Cold
Equations
of Winter
Equations
of Winter
Ada M. Vosk — a novel
Cold Set.
We draw letters for the screen age — set cold, without heat or lead, and tuned to the exact millisecond a reader stops to breathe.
Type is infrastructure. It should carry a paragraph the way a bridge carries a river — invisibly, and without ever asking to be thanked.
A.Cold, on purpose
“Cold set” once meant type composed without molten metal — photographic, then digital. We took the name as a discipline: every curve is cut on a screen and proofed on a screen, at the sizes it will actually be read.
B.Variable by default
Each family ships as a single variable file with continuous axes — weight, width, optical size. One file, an infinite number of instances, tuned live in the tester below rather than sold to you as forty separate weights.
C.Drawn to be used
Real figures. Real small caps. Fractions, tabular numerals, five stylistic sets. We build the boring, load-bearing glyphs first — the ones a working designer reaches for at 2 a.m. on deadline.
§ 01The Library — Four Variable FamiliesHover to range · Click to test
01Sablier
Contrast Serif72 stylesOpsz 9–144From $64Test →
Handset in the cold
02Signal
Neo-Grotesque48 stylesWdth 25–151From $56Test →
Quiet, fast, exact
03Placard
Display Grotesque24 stylesWght 200–800From $48Test →
Loud on paper
04Ledger
Monospace16 stylesWght 100–800From $40Test →
set = cold();
§ 02The Tester — Type AnythingContrast Serif
The frost held every letter perfectly still.
Size88 px
Weight340
Width100
Optical72
Tracking0
Leading1.02
AlignLeft
StyleRoman
Now testing · Sablier · Cléo Vance, 2021
font-variation-settings: 'wght' 340;
§ 03Character Set— glyphs
§ 04Licensing & OpenTypePer family · Perpetual
License TierSablier · single family
Desktop1–3 workstations · print & static$64
WebSelf-host · 250k pageviews / mo$88
AppOne embedded application$180
BroadcastPer production, worldwide$420
TrialNon-commercial testing onlyFree
Complete SetAll four families · every axis · desktop + web$960
OpenType FeatureCoverage by family
| Feature | Sab | Sig | Pla | Led |
|---|
● Included · ○ Not drawn. Every family ships with kerning, five languages of accents and a slashed zero as standard.
§ 05In UseSet entirely in the Cold Set library
Night
Press
Fair
Press
Fair
Letterpress · Risograph · Hot & Cold Type · Live Casting
Field Notes / Issue 14
The engineers who fell in love with a curve
For eleven years the studio measured latency in milliseconds and beauty in almost nothing at all. Then a single terminal comma — set too tight, then too loose — cost them a morning and taught them the whole trade. A letter, they decided, is a machine for holding a reader’s attention just long enough. Not longer. The width of a stroke is a decision about time. Every ascender is a small promise that the sentence will, eventually, end. They rebuilt the face from the comma outward, proofed it at every optical size between a caption and a billboard, and shipped it cold — no lead, no heat, no apology.
Words — H. Kesslerfol. 24
InstanceAxisValueΔ
SABLIER-Text-Regularwght340.0▲ 0.4
SIGNAL-Cond-Boldwdth062.5▼ 1.1
PLACARD-Poster-Blackwght800.0▲ 2.0
LEDGER-Data-Mediumopsz014.0▲ 0.0
Set cold.
Ship warm.
Ship warm.