Cats of Kochi · the type change · 5 August 2026
The Guardian's arrangement, and the one font we now download to get it.
You said: use whatever the Guardian has proven, and change ours to fit. Two things follow, and the second reverses my earlier advice.
1. The body becomes a serif and captions become a sans — the opposite of what the site does today. 2. We now download one font, 24.5 KB, because the free-and-already-on-the-phone option turned out to be measurably worse for most of your readers.
I previously said ship none. That was right about the old fonts and wrong about what replaces them, because I never checked what an Android phone actually shows. 82% of your readers are in India, overwhelmingly on Android.
| Same sentence, 18px | Line width | x-height |
|---|---|---|
| Noticia Text — what we'd download | 545px | 9.54 |
| Georgia — iPhones and Windows only | 518px | 8.67 |
| What Android gives you free | 472px | 8.08 |
The free option sets your writing 13% narrower with letters 15% smaller — thinner, more like an old book, harder in bright light. That is most of your audience reading a visibly weaker page.
For scale: one photograph on your site is many times bigger than this. The words appear immediately in the stand-in font and swap to the real one the moment it lands — so nothing waits on it.
⚠️ I gave you two wrong numbers before this one — 24.5 KB, then 43.9 KB — and I also said we could trim about 19 KB off for free. That saving does not exist. The files are already as small as they go. Please ignore it; there is nothing for anyone to go and do.
61.1 KB is what a reader actually downloads, weighed on the real files. The cause was mine: I was measuring what Google's server handed my browser, and it hands different browsers slightly different versions of the same font. The lesson is simple — weigh the file we ship, not the one we looked at.
Noticia Text, free and openly licensed. Of eight fonts I measured it was the smallest, and it is drawn for exactly this job — news text on a screen, which is what the Guardian's own font is for.
⭐ It also writes numbers evenly. Georgia sets “40” and “9.30” with letters that bob up and down — fine in a novel, wrong on a page where the fares and the ferry times are the point.
⭐ Italics are included and downloaded. I had left them out to save 13 KB; you said not to over-optimise against readability, and you were right — a memoir uses italics for dish names, boat names and emphasis, and a computer-slanted serif looks exactly like what it is.
⛔ Still not bought: a second font for the small print (your phone's own is excellent there) and a separate headline font.
⭐ The best thing this pass turned up, and it is specific to you: this font has no ₹ sign. Checked twice — it has 227 characters and the rupee is not one of them. So every rupee symbol would be drawn by a different font: one odd-looking character in the middle of every price, on a site where all the prices are in rupees.
Not worth fixing with code. In the writing, say “40 rupees” — which reads better for a visitor who may not know the symbol anyway. In a tight facts strip, ₹ is fine. And the general lesson is now a rule: always check the rupee before choosing a font for an Indian site.
The specimens below now render Noticia Text with metric-matched fallback CSS in place if the face has not landed yet (F5, F6, 2026-08-08) — the page never claims a font state it has not measured; see the note at the foot.
Before — sans body, 1.6 leading, full-line gaps
Pepper House
It is down the lane past the barber, the one with the blue shutter, and you will walk past the entrance twice before you find it. Everyone does.
Inside, the courtyard opens up and the noise of Bazaar Road stops completely. That is the thing worth coming for.
The courtyard from the first-floor landing.
After — serif body, 1.5 leading, half-line gaps, sans caption
Pepper House
It is down the lane past the barber, the one with the blue shutter, and you will walk past the entrance twice before you find it. Everyone does.
Inside, the courtyard opens up and the noise of Bazaar Road stops completely. That is the thing worth coming for.
The courtyard from the first-floor landing.
The after is tighter and shorter — same words, less scrolling. The caption is now clearly a different voice from the story, because it is a different kind of letter rather than just a smaller one.
| Was | Now | Guardian | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Space between lines | 1.6 | 1.5 | 1.40 |
| Gap between paragraphs | 24px | half a line | half a line |
| Caption size | 15px | 14px | 12px |
The paragraph gap goes to exactly theirs — nothing about your reader makes it different. The other two stop short of theirs on purpose, and the reasons are written into the files: your reader is outside in the sun, and your pieces are long reads, not news.
That is the rule now, for everything: take what the Guardian has proven, and only depart from it when we can name something about your reader that is genuinely different. “We do it differently” is no longer a reason.
Every number here was measured in a browser on 5 August 2026 — the Guardian's on their own site, the fonts by downloading the real files and weighing them.