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700
400
PAIRING ID: MR--IBM // ETHOS: HANDWRITING + SANS-SERIF

Balancing Mr Dafoe with IBM Plex Sans

Anchor the expressive personality of Mr Dafoe with the utilitarian clarity of IBM Plex Sans.

Display Face

Mr Dafoe

Weight: 700

Body Face

IBM Plex Sans

Weight: 400

This pairing is engineered for teams that need a clear hierarchy without sacrificing brand voice. Mr Dafoe brings vintage, script, nameplate energy to hero units, pricing sections, and campaign headlines. IBM Plex Sans absorbs the heavy lifting for paragraphs, product storytelling, and UI labels with its corporate, neutral, humanist 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 Mr Dafoe with IBM Plex Sans

Anchor the expressive personality of Mr Dafoe with the utilitarian clarity of IBM Plex Sans.

This pairing is engineered for teams that need a clear hierarchy without sacrificing brand voice. Mr Dafoe brings vintage, script, nameplate energy to hero units, pricing sections, and campaign headlines. IBM Plex Sans absorbs the heavy lifting for paragraphs, product storytelling, and UI labels with its corporate, neutral, humanist 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.

Mr Dafoe thrives as a headline face thanks to its vintage, script, nameplate qualities. Use weights 400–600 for crisp editorial lockups.
IBM Plex Sans excels in paragraphs and UI thanks to its corporate, neutral, humanist traits. Keep it between weights 400–600 for optimal readability.
Hierarchy guidance: run a 1:1.4 modular scale and reserve Mr Dafoe for H1–H3 while IBM Plex Sans powers captions, body copy, and data tables.

Best-Fit Use Cases

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

Accessibility Notes

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

CSS Implementation Cheatsheet

:root {
  --tm-header-family: 'Mr Dafoe', handwriting;
  --tm-body-family: 'IBM Plex Sans', 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 Mr Dafoe at 400 for momentum, while forms, tables, and footnotes stay on IBM Plex Sans with 400 weight for predictable kerning.

FAQs

Why does Mr Dafoe make sense as the lead font?

Mr Dafoe owns the emotional register of this system. Its vintage, script, nameplate profile helps anchor campaign creative, meaning marketing and product teams can reuse the same voice without reinventing the scale.

Where should IBM Plex Sans show up?

IBM Plex Sans is the workhorse. Keep it in paragraphs, long-form editorial, knowledge bases, or anywhere legibility is non-negotiable. Its corporate, neutral, humanist 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.