TYPEMATCHSEO
Launch

TYPEMATCH.

V2.1

Browse Directory
700
400
PAIRING ID: TAN-SOU // ETHOS: HANDWRITING + SANS-SERIF

Balancing Tangerine with Source Sans Pro

Anchor the expressive personality of Tangerine with the utilitarian clarity of Source Sans Pro.

Display Face

Tangerine

Weight: 700

Body Face

Source Sans Pro

Weight: 400

This pairing is engineered for teams that need a clear hierarchy without sacrificing brand voice. Tangerine brings calligraphy, elegant, tall energy to hero units, pricing sections, and campaign headlines. Source Sans Pro absorbs the heavy lifting for paragraphs, product storytelling, and UI labels with its ui-focused, legible, adobe 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 Tangerine with Source Sans Pro

Anchor the expressive personality of Tangerine with the utilitarian clarity of Source Sans Pro.

This pairing is engineered for teams that need a clear hierarchy without sacrificing brand voice. Tangerine brings calligraphy, elegant, tall energy to hero units, pricing sections, and campaign headlines. Source Sans Pro absorbs the heavy lifting for paragraphs, product storytelling, and UI labels with its ui-focused, legible, adobe 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.

Tangerine thrives as a headline face thanks to its calligraphy, elegant, tall qualities. Use weights 700–900 for crisp editorial lockups.
Source Sans Pro excels in paragraphs and UI thanks to its ui-focused, legible, adobe traits. Keep it between weights 400–600 for optimal readability.
Hierarchy guidance: run a 1:1.4 modular scale and reserve Tangerine for H1–H3 while Source Sans Pro powers captions, body copy, and data tables.

Best-Fit Use Cases

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

Accessibility Notes

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

CSS Implementation Cheatsheet

:root {
  --tm-header-family: 'Tangerine', handwriting;
  --tm-body-family: 'Source Sans Pro', 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 Tangerine at 700 for momentum, while forms, tables, and footnotes stay on Source Sans Pro with 400 weight for predictable kerning.

FAQs

Why does Tangerine make sense as the lead font?

Tangerine owns the emotional register of this system. Its calligraphy, elegant, tall profile helps anchor campaign creative, meaning marketing and product teams can reuse the same voice without reinventing the scale.

Where should Source Sans Pro show up?

Source Sans Pro is the workhorse. Keep it in paragraphs, long-form editorial, knowledge bases, or anywhere legibility is non-negotiable. Its ui-focused, legible, adobe 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.