Field Guide's typography follows a convention established by the National Park Service's Unigrid system — itself originally set in Helvetica paired with Times New Roman before adopting NPS's own custom typefaces. Pairing a highly legible sans with a serif is a deliberate choice: the sans carries interface text and dense functional copy, while the serif distinguishes long-form reading — reports, case studies, pull quotes — from the UI around it, making the shift between "using the tool" and "reading what it produced" legible at a glance.
Public Sans and Source Serif 4 carry that same functional spirit in open-source form.
Edit tokens.css to test changes — every sample below reads live from those variables.
Field Guide
48px / 60032px / 60024px / 60020px / 60018px / 500This record combines occurrence data from GBIF, habitat classification from USGS PAD-US, and survey history from Washington state wildlife records.
16px / 4003 sources referenced · last synchronized 2 hours ago
14px / 400Retrieved from GBIF occurrence record #2847193
12px / 40011px / 600, tracked22px / 600 tabular13px / 50015px / 60040px / 60028px / 60022px / 600Ecological data is often genuinely public — but the data being open doesn't make it usable.
20px / 400Each source follows its own taxonomy, spatial convention, and format, shaped by whoever collected it and for what immediate purpose. Combining even two or three of these sources into one coherent picture takes real, repeated manual labor.
18px / 400, 1.6The tools that make it usable are typically built for institutions with compliance budgets, not for the individual researcher trying to answer one honest question.
22px / italicFig. 3 — Crosswalk flow from three sources into the canonical schema spine.
14px / italic