Every text has one phrase that matters most

The marker

• Typeface: Supermarker Italic. It never stands alone; it always sits inside a line of Struve. One exception: the industry chip, below.
• Same size, weight, tracking and baseline as the Struve around it. Struve 400 takes Supermarker Italic, 500 takes Medium Italic, 600 takes Bold Italic. Never scale it up.
• One phrase per text, one to three words, on the words that carry the meaning.
• It shares its line with Struve. Never a whole line, never a line of its own. Like any words, it may break across lines.
• Colour: the text's colour, on every ground.
• English only. Supermarker has no Arabic: in Arabic, keep the Arabic face.
• Display sizes only. The marker is an accent for a headline or a quote; in a small line, a caption or a card's text it doesn't read, so leave it out.
• Words, not numbers. Figures stay in Struve; mark a word next to them if anything.

Don't

The industry chip

The one place the marker stands alone: an industry's name in a white pill, after its line icon. It labels a post or a card: one chip per layout, in a corner on the margin, or all of them in a row in their strip.

The line under the marker

The line underlines the marker phrase, the way a hand underlines a word with a highlighter. Use it when the text carries the whole message: a quote, a number, a statement. Leave it out when a picture already leads.

The tool

It is not a text underline and not a brush. It is our Underline path, assets/line/underline.svg, drawn with the broad-nib pen from the lab: the same pen that draws every blob. The pen makes the stroke fuller in the middle and cuts its ends at an angle, like a real marker.

How it's built

1. Measure the marker phrase, from its first letter to its last.
2. Stretch the Underline path to that width, plus 0.1 em on each side.
3. Set its centre 0.14 em above the baseline, so it runs under the lower half of the letters.
4. Draw it with the pen, 55–70% of the type size thick.
5. Put it behind the letters.
6. If the phrase breaks across lines, draw a piece for each line.

On each ground

The line takes a colour the ground doesn't have; the letters keep the text colour.

Don't

Marker and line together

See it in use ↗