TYPEMATCHSEO
Launch

TYPEMATCH.

V2.1

Browse Directory
700
400
PAIRING ID: STA-OPE // ETHOS: DISPLAY + SANS-SERIF

Balancing Stardos Stencil with Open Sans

Anchor the expressive personality of Stardos Stencil with the utilitarian clarity of Open Sans.

Display Face

Stardos Stencil

Weight: 700

Body Face

Open Sans

Weight: 400

This pairing is engineered for teams that need a clear hierarchy without sacrificing brand voice. Stardos Stencil brings stencil, army, rugged energy to hero units, pricing sections, and campaign headlines. Open Sans absorbs the heavy lifting for paragraphs, product storytelling, and UI labels with its friendly, neutral, legible 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 Stardos Stencil with Open Sans

Anchor the expressive personality of Stardos Stencil with the utilitarian clarity of Open Sans.

This pairing is engineered for teams that need a clear hierarchy without sacrificing brand voice. Stardos Stencil brings stencil, army, rugged energy to hero units, pricing sections, and campaign headlines. Open Sans absorbs the heavy lifting for paragraphs, product storytelling, and UI labels with its friendly, neutral, legible 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.

Stardos Stencil thrives as a headline face thanks to its stencil, army, rugged qualities. Use weights 700–900 for crisp editorial lockups.
Open Sans excels in paragraphs and UI thanks to its friendly, neutral, legible traits. Keep it between weights 400–600 for optimal readability.
Hierarchy guidance: run a 1:1.4 modular scale and reserve Stardos Stencil for H1–H3 while Open Sans powers captions, body copy, and data tables.

Best-Fit Use Cases

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

Accessibility Notes

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

CSS Implementation Cheatsheet

:root {
  --tm-header-family: 'Stardos Stencil', display;
  --tm-body-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif;
  --tm-header-weight: 700;
  --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 Stardos Stencil at 700 for momentum, while forms, tables, and footnotes stay on Open Sans with 400 weight for predictable kerning.

FAQs

Why does Stardos Stencil make sense as the lead font?

Stardos Stencil owns the emotional register of this system. Its stencil, army, rugged profile helps anchor campaign creative, meaning marketing and product teams can reuse the same voice without reinventing the scale.

Where should Open Sans show up?

Open Sans is the workhorse. Keep it in paragraphs, long-form editorial, knowledge bases, or anywhere legibility is non-negotiable. Its friendly, neutral, legible 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.