Jun 12, 2026Typography
Type scales that stop fighting the grid
Rounding a modular scale to the baseline rhythm removed the pixel-nudging phase entirely and made handoff notes almost unnecessary.
A pure modular scale is beautiful in a specimen and awkward in a layout: sizes land between baseline steps and every component needs a nudge to look settled.
We generated the scale as usual, then rounded each step so its line height was a whole multiple of a 4px rhythm. The ratio drifts slightly; nobody has ever noticed.
What disappeared was the last hour of every layout — the one spent moving things two pixels at a time until they felt right.
