Climate Crisis
Type with Purpose
Good typography guides attention, improves understanding, and makes communication effortless.
The Anatomy of a Typeface
By FontSide · June 2026
Every typeface is a system of decisions — about stroke contrast, x-height, spacing, and rhythm. The best ones feel invisible: you stop seeing the letters and start hearing the voice behind them. That transparency is the hardest thing to design.
A high x-height opens up the counters and makes small text breathe. Tight tracking pulls a headline together; loose tracking gives a caption room to exhale. None of these choices are accidents — they are arguments about how reading should feel.
Uppercase
Lowercase
Numerals
Symbols
Package Manager
The recommended way to use fonts in modern web projects.
1. Install Package
pnpm add @fontsource-variable/climate-crisis2. Import in App
import '@fontsource-variable/climate-crisis/wght.css';3. CSS Usage
body {
font-family: "Climate Crisis Variable", system-ui;
}Google Fonts CDN
Use Google's CDN to embed the fonts directly via HTML.
HTML <head>
<!-- Please select at least one weight and style -->Fontsource CDN
Skip the build step by adding this directly to your global CSS file.
Global CSS
/* climate-crisis-latin-wght-normal */
@font-face {
font-family: "Climate Crisis Variable";
font-style: normal;
font-display: swap;
font-weight: 100 900;
src: url(https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/fontsource/fonts/climate-crisis:vf@latest/latin-wght-normal.woff2)
format("woff2-variations");
}Background & Story
Climate Crisis, is a variable font designed to help visualise the urgency of climate change, designed for Helsingin Sanomat, the largest Nordic newspaper. The typeface’s weight responds to the levels of Arctic sea ice from 1979 to 2019 and predictions for 2050, based on data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Case study on the mini website.
To contribute, see github.com/dancoull/ClimateCrisis.
Show your type melting over time like a glacier with Climate Crisis and its Year axis
As mentioned in the recent article about the Tilt family, Google Fonts is adding a bunch of new expressive variable fonts and axes to the library. Check out the latest release, Climate Crisis.
Climate Crisis, with its new variable axis called Year, was commissioned by the Nordic newspaper "Helsingin Sanomat" to use in its own editorial and marketing. It visualizes the urgency of climate change by appearing to degrade over time, like each character is a glacier melting away. More than just a metaphor, the font reflects actual data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center to represent the levels of Arctic sea ice from 1979 to 2019. Satellite measuring began in 1979. Predictive data from The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is used to visualize the ice melting through 2050.
The typeface's designers, Daniel Coull and Eino Korkala included eight masters for the Year axis. (When type designers create a variable font, they need to embed masters at each extreme end of a variable axis, but often they embed multiple masters along the axis in order to give the in-between instances more finesse.) The heaviest weight represents the Arctic sea ice in 1979. The lightest weight represents the IPCC's 2050 forecast, when only 30% of the ice will remain.
To learn more, read:
Show your type melting over time like a glacier with Climate Crisis and its Year axis.Climate Crisis minisite
Tags & Moods
Subsets
Install
pnpm add @fontsource-variable/climate-crisisDesigned by
Daniel Coull, Eino Korkala
Links
License
OFL-1.1