Background/Goal

In T303587: Choose typographies (Sans Serif and Serif) for designing our text styles in Figma in different languages, we defined a stack of design fonts (sans, serif and monospace) to be applied to our components in Figma. The main selection criteria for said font families were:

• They have a neutral look that makes them visually “similar” to the fonts that users will see in production (i.e. common OS/ browser defaults).

• They keep our designs accessible across platforms: 
Use web fonts that are Figma font stack, so downloads are not required. 
This is in order to remove the barrier for contributors, regardless of their operative system or available local fonts.


• They allow us to work with a variety of scripts.

The latter criterion is not 100% met. Although the selected fonts offer good support for Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts, they do not provide coverage for many other languages. To allow the use of other scripts with Codex design components, we'll rely on Figma's capacity to replace missing characters using Noto Sans as a fallback. Now, this default font replacement should be documented in our guidelines to avoid confusion.

User stories

• As a designer, I need to be aware of the fact that working with scripts other than Latin, Cyrillic and Greek when reusing Codex components will trigger Figma to use the fallback Noto Sans.

Considerations

Acceptance criteria (or Done)

• Document our approach to internationalization in our Typography guidelines in Figma