TYPEMATCHSEO
Launch

TYPEMATCH.

V2.1

Browse Directory
700
400
PAIRING ID: LIM-KAR // ETHOS: DISPLAY + SANS-SERIF

Balancing Limelight with Karla

Anchor the expressive personality of Limelight with the utilitarian clarity of Karla.

Display Face

Limelight

Weight: 700

Body Face

Karla

Weight: 400

This pairing is engineered for teams that need a clear hierarchy without sacrificing brand voice. Limelight brings art-deco, retro, cinema energy to hero units, pricing sections, and campaign headlines. Karla absorbs the heavy lifting for paragraphs, product storytelling, and UI labels with its grotesque, humanist, quirky texture and dependable rhythm. Together they create a typography stack that scales from high-impact landing pages to dense documentation without retooling your CSS tokens.

Typographic Hierarchy & Scale

H1The Quick Fox
H2The Quick Fox
H3The Quick Fox
PThe quick brown fox jumps over...
Dark Context
Aa

High contrast negative space.

Accent
Gg

Legibility on high-chroma.

Pairing Strategy

Balancing Limelight with Karla

Anchor the expressive personality of Limelight with the utilitarian clarity of Karla.

This pairing is engineered for teams that need a clear hierarchy without sacrificing brand voice. Limelight brings art-deco, retro, cinema energy to hero units, pricing sections, and campaign headlines. Karla absorbs the heavy lifting for paragraphs, product storytelling, and UI labels with its grotesque, humanist, quirky texture and dependable rhythm. Together they create a typography stack that scales from high-impact landing pages to dense documentation without retooling your CSS tokens.

Limelight thrives as a headline face thanks to its art-deco, retro, cinema qualities. Use weights 400–600 for crisp editorial lockups.
Karla excels in paragraphs and UI thanks to its grotesque, humanist, quirky traits. Keep it between weights 400–600 for optimal readability.
Hierarchy guidance: run a 1:1.4 modular scale and reserve Limelight for H1–H3 while Karla powers captions, body copy, and data tables.

Best-Fit Use Cases

  • High-growth SaaS landing pages that require art-deco hero statements with trustworthy product copy.
  • Editorial magazines and thought-leadership hubs where Limelight can dramatize pull quotes while Karla keeps 1,500-word essays skimmable.
  • Conversion funnels or onboarding flows that need Karla's grotesque voice to balance Limelight's attention-grabbing display.

Accessibility Notes

Maintain a minimum 4.5:1 contrast ratio for Karla body copy and loosen letter-spacing to 0.01em for uppercase Limelight moments. Pairing different categories demands disciplined color pairing—test both light and dark themes to ensure Karla does not bloom at small sizes.

CSS Implementation Cheatsheet

:root {
  --tm-header-family: 'Limelight', display;
  --tm-body-family: 'Karla', sans-serif;
  --tm-header-weight: 400;
  --tm-body-weight: 400;
  --tm-header-tracking: -0.04em;
  --tm-body-tracking: 0em;
}
Heading scale: clamp(2.75rem, 4.5vw, 5.25rem) for H1, clamp(1.5rem, 2.8vw, 3rem) for H2, and keep paragraph size at 1rem–1.125rem with 1.6 line-height.
Component guidance: Buttons inherit Limelight at 400 for momentum, while forms, tables, and footnotes stay on Karla with 400 weight for predictable kerning.

FAQs

Why does Limelight make sense as the lead font?

Limelight owns the emotional register of this system. Its art-deco, retro, cinema profile helps anchor campaign creative, meaning marketing and product teams can reuse the same voice without reinventing the scale.

Where should Karla show up?

Karla is the workhorse. Keep it in paragraphs, long-form editorial, knowledge bases, or anywhere legibility is non-negotiable. Its grotesque, humanist, quirky qualities reduce fatigue on dense layouts.

Does this pairing support complex localization?

Yes—both families are available on Google Fonts with generous glyph coverage. Test cyrillic/latin accents early, but most Latin-based locales and UI patterns are fully supported.