Big Neutrals

If I asked most people to picture a word in their head, they probably wouldn’t imagine it typeset in a heavy blackletter or an ornate script. They’d likely visualize something cleaner, simpler, more neutral: an unembellished sans serif, the kind that wouldn’t be too out of place on a subway ad for direct-to-consumer toothpaste. The font in their mind’s eye might even resemble Polymode Sans, a new typeface designed by XYZ Type in collaboration with Polymode, which describes itself as a typeface that “expresses a point of view while still remaining neutral.”

At first glance, Polymode Sans looks as described—about as unobtrusive as any other contemporary sans serif. But neutrality is rarely as straightforward as it seems. Pink hair may not be neutral at a white-collar office, but neither is a white button-down shirt at a rave. Typography follows the same logic: Courier is as neutral to a screenwriter as Comic Sans is to a kindergarten teacher. What feels neutral in one era or setting may be expressive, even controversial, in another. Polymode Sans takes that shifting sense of neutrality as its foundation. Instead of assuming a fixed, one-size-fits-all neutrality, it acknowledges that what blends in depends entirely on context. It’s less of a fence-sitter and more of a fence-straddler—designed to flex rather than fade. A typeface, like language or dress, is never truly neutral on its own; it adapts to its surroundings, shaped by the expectations of those who use it. As Polymode and XYZ describe it, “the typeface is about how we’re all code-switching.”

To understand why Polymode Sans looks the way it does, it’s worth asking how sans serifs became the default visual language of “neutral” in the first place. While often credited as a 19th-century invention, their origins stretch much further into antiquity; the monolinear letterforms that populate the genre can actually be traced to classical inscriptions and neoclassical architecture. For example, Sir John Soane, English architect and all-around philhellene, deployed unadorned geometric type throughout his work decades before the purported “birth” of sans serifs like William Caslon IV’s 1816 “Two Lines Egyptian.” Though initially dismissed by the printing industry, sans serifs gained traction over the 19th century, appearing with increasing frequency in European signage and engravings. Their association with classical ideals—order, symmetry, and purity—lent them a sense of stability and tradition while still allowing them to shed the fussy, handmade qualities of their serifed and blackletter predecessors. Sans looked to an industrialized future, embracing efficiency and legibility at a moment when mass production was reshaping visual culture.

By the early 20th century, those classical associations had begun to shift. Modernist designers began reinterpreting sans serifs not as historical artifacts but as tools of progress and liberal universality instead. This transition reached its peak in the 1920s with typefaces like Jakob Erbar’s 1926 Erbar Grotesk and Paul Renner’s 1927 magnum opus, Futura, which massaged sans serifs into near-perfect geometric forms—circular _O_s, triangular _A_s—with strict modularity as a means of embodying a forward-looking, rationalist future. Futura, in particular, was designed as an assertion of progressive ideals. Developed for the New Frankfurt project—a sweeping social housing initiative—Futura was positioned as “the typeface of our time,” rejecting the ornate, script-like styles still dominant in Germany and signaling a future built on accessibility and equity.

But Futura’s modernist clarity also aligned uncomfortably with the era’s broader pursuit of uniformity; the same qualities that made these typefaces symbols of utopian progress also made them tools of standardization and control. In prewar Germany, in particular, type became a battleground for national identity—blackletter signaled tradition and German-ness, while roman typefaces like Futura symbolized modernity. Yet, while initially embraced by the Nazi regime, blackletter was abruptly banned in 1941 for its “Jewish origins” (the typeface was deemed too similar to Hebrew) and replaced by typefaces like Futura. This shift cemented geometric sans serifs as tools of ideological control, valued not just for their association with progress but for their perceived neutrality—their ability to function across cultural and political lines. That paradox—being both outside of history and rooted in an idealized past—secured their dominance throughout the 20th century.

Like all radical ideas that succeed, sans serifs eventually shed both their progressive and authoritarian associations to simply become neutral. Their simplified forms and modular structure made them flexible containers, adaptable across industries, cultures, and time periods. What was once revolutionary became ordinary, and what’s ordinary becomes invisible. By the late 20th century, sans serifs—particularly geometric and grotesque styles—had become the default choice for everything from corporate logos to government documents. Case in point: entities as disparate as Campari, the Beach Boys, Richard Nixon, Lego, Dolce & Gabbana, Stanley Kubrick, NASA, Fox News, the Minnesota Timberwolves, Barack Obama, Dodge, Sesame Street, and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration have all used Futura at one point in time—the font’s contemporary usage is a far cry from its origins in social housing collectives. Recent numbers reinforce this dominance. Typography research organization Proof&Co.’s annual report found that geometric and grotesque sans serifs were two of the top three most popular type genres released in 2022—the same year Polymode Sans was made available to the public. Sans serifs not only accounted for the majority of new releases but also commanded the highest average prices. Neutrality, it seems, sells.

If sans serifs became the default through sheer ubiquity, Polymode Sans arrives as both an extension of that tradition and a disruptor of it. It is, after all, still a sans serif—but what kind? Rather than following the sleek, geometric models that have come to define neutrality in recent decades or the classicist forms that preceded them, Polymode Sans traces its lineage to Lining Gothic, a 19th-century “jobbing” typeface. Unlike contemporary typefaces, which tend to maintain structural consistency across weights and widths, jobbing typefaces were assembled piecemeal, with shifts in construction from style to style. This variation in forms made them functionally neutral, able to slip into different contexts without demanding attention. But that same variation also gave them a certain oddness; they contain irregular proportions, unexpected shapes, and quirks that linger from one iteration of a style to the next. Their neutrality was incidental—not a product of deliberate restraint but a side effect of their practical necessity. Polymode Sans builds on these quirks, amplifying their tension while maintaining the balance of clarity and individuality that made Lining Gothic such a compelling starting point. The squared-off structure of Lining Gothic becomes sharper in Polymode Sans—the flat horizontal strokes are more pronounced, the hook-arched r is more distinctive, and the rhythm of straight-sided letters is more jagged—asserting a stronger presence within the design.

Lining Gothic’s improvisational adaptability carries through in more than just Polymode Sans’s letterforms. Like its predecessor, Polymode Sans is malleable. But where Lining Gothic’s malleability emerged from its slapdash, bottom-up construction, Polymode Sans takes a more intentional, top-down approach. It does this by functioning as a variable typeface. Unlike most, which simply modulate weight or width, Polymode Sans introduces an additional layer of flexibility to the variable typeface: a “Realness” axis that shifts in personality across four modes—Acting Basic, Going to Work, Attitude, and Opulence. The typeface at its most restrained, Polymode Sans Acting Basic aligns with the conventional expectations of a sans serif: the terminals of characters like the t and a end in rigid squares, while the tail of the g is rounded, reinforcing a familiar sense of functional neutrality. As the evolution progresses, Going to Work begins to invert this relationship (and our expectations)—the overall structure remains stable, but the terminals on the a and s flare out and become a bit kicky, while the tail of the g flattens. With Attitude, the terminals of the t have extended and sharpened, and the bowls of letters like d and p get pinched into trapezoids. Finally, in Opulence—the type’s most expressive state—Polymode Sans fully blooms: the bowls of lowercase letters nearly become triangles, the ends of g and s extend into dramatic underbites, and uppercase proportions shift dramatically—a narrow E, a big-bellied B, an asymmetrical Z, a low-waisted Y. By moving its variable spectrum beyond formal characteristics, Polymode Sans reframes typographic identity as something responsive—fluid, rather than fixed.

Polymode Sans challenges conventional notions of neutrality and identity by embracing variability, but it also disrupts them in a more focused way: through its connection to queerness, where identity has always been understood as mutable. Rather than signaling queerness through overt visual cues, Polymode Sans embodies queerness in its refusal to conform to a singular aesthetic or fixed mode of being. This perspective mirrors larger conversations about “queering typography” within the design world, where designers like Paul Soulellis and Nat Pyper have explored queerness as a method of challenging typographic norms, disrupting default aesthetics, and foregrounding marginalized perspectives.

This rejection of singular narratives was, in fact, embedded in the typeface’s creation from the start. Polymode and XYZ approached the typeface design project through the lens of Poetic Research, a process that involves casting a deliberately wide net across literature, art, and activism. Rather than adhering to a rigid brief, they pulled from sources as varied as Walt Whitman’s poetry, Candy Darling’s camp aesthetics, the geometric patterns of Native American quilts, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ecological philosophies in Braiding Sweetgrass. Some of these references are explicitly queer, while others become queer through association, interpretation, and personal resonance. (Consider Alison Bechdel’s ring of keys in Fun Home, where queerness isn’t intrinsic to the object itself but to the recognition it sparks.) Instead of distilling these influences into a singular aesthetic, Polymode’s research process allows them to coexist, layering multiple histories, identities, and worldviews onto a typeface that redefines neutrality as an accumulation rather than an absence. If neutrality is always contextual, then the expansion of context can create a broader, more inclusive set of neutrals—an averaging out of many possible neutrals.

For all the distinctions designers can spot between different kinds of sans serifs, to most people, a sans serif is just a sans serif (if that). Despite their stylistic variety and distinct histories, jobbing, geometric, humanist, and every other kind of sans have blurred into what the general public simply sees as the neutral visual language of the contemporary world. But nothing stays neutral forever. The past decade has seen a growing fatigue with geometric sans serifs—not just as overused defaults but as symbols of a particular era’s ideals. Once shorthand for modernity and progress, they’ve since been politicized. To the right, they signal a certain brand of liberal elitism tied to corporate DEI initiatives and the so-called woke mind virus. To the left, they represent consumer excess and tepid rainbow capitalism. Lately, that backlash has moved beyond design discourse and into real-world execution. As part of an overhaul for his new term, the Trump administration replaced the White House’s core typeface, Decimal—a utilitarian sans serif by Hoefler&Co—with Instrument Serif, a free (quelle surprise!) Google font that closely resembles ITC Garamond Condensed.

Trump’s rejection of modernist design—including sans serifs—is an embrace of a more hierarchical, nostalgic aesthetic. Garamond Condensed is, after all, a descendant of Garamond, a typeface with origins in 16th-century France. But it also conjures a period when Garamond Condensed was ubiquitous in editorial advertising—the 1980s, a decade of slick consumerism and corporate excess, shadowed by Reaganomics and the devastation of the AIDS crisis. Just as the Obama campaign’s use of Gotham cemented the association between sans serifs and progressivism, Trump’s preference for a serif marks a deliberate break from that lineage. It aligns with his broader push for classical forms in architecture and design, as seen in his Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture, which explicitly rejects modernist building styles as “unappealing” and promotes classical architecture as the preferred default for federal buildings.

Neutrality is never truly neutral; it’s a slippery thing, shaped by culture, context, and use. As the idea of neutral becomes increasingly fraught—flattened into corporate sameness in some cases, wielded as a reactionary tool in others—the question isn’t whether a typeface can be neutral, but what kind of neutrality it enacts. Polymode Sans resists the fate of many other sans not by rejecting neutrality outright but by redefining it. It treats neutrality not as an aesthetic absence but as a framework for choice. This is what makes the Realness axis so potent. By framing the opposite of neutrality as “opulence,” the typeface introduces a productive tension. Opulence, in this case, is not about embellishment but about the freedom to take up space, to make oneself seen. In a landscape dominated by uniformity and—increasingly—by reactionary nostalgia, the ability to choose how to present, how to shift, and how to adapt becomes a kind of luxury. Polymode Sans thrives in that tension. Its forms are not inherently opulent, but its flexibility is. It refuses the idea that neutrality equals self-erasure, offering instead a model where fluidity itself becomes the neutral state. Neutrality isn’t fixed, only negotiated. With Polymode Sans, it belongs to those who use it.