Welcome Amica Pro, a workhorse sans designed to give your branding a friendly, approachable look. What is it that makes a typeface friendly? Schizotype undertook extensive research* in this and the results are in! To cut a long story short, friendliness in sans serif fonts can be summed up in two words – short and fat. Basically, think Danny DeVito in letter form. The shortness in Amica Pro is achieved (somewhat counterintuitively) by pushing up the x-height. This, coupled with short ascenders and descenders, gives the text a squat appearance. For the fatness, that’s easy in the bolder weights, but how to carry this through to the lights? Here, the fatness equates to roundness, so the letterforms, even if the stroke weight is light, have a rotund appearance from the wideness and roundness of the circular glyphs.
When thinking about friendliness, we think about inclusiveness. To this end, Amica Pro supports a super wide range of latin-based languages, as it uses Underware’s Latin Plus character set, as well as extra support for Vietnamese.
Amica Pro is best used for branding, logos, infographics etc. It will give your UI a friendlier feel, but that doesn’t mean it’s not serious. There are many useful typographic features, including alternates, numerous figure styles, automatic fractions and case-sensitive forms. The italics are carefully optically corrected “sloped romans” and as such they are the same width as their upright equivalent, so changing your copy to italics will not mess around with the spacing.
*I looked at a few fonts and drew some lazy conclusions.
