Typography

Players read under pressure, so in W4 legibility beats decoration wherever something must be read fast: costs, timers, errors, lists. Decoration is allowed for titles and big moments.

The faces

• Alegreya Sans is the body face for everything you read in play.
• Fira Mono is for numbers that change and must not jitter: timers, gold, scores, frame rate.
• A display face (a classical engraved serif) is planned for page titles, banners and victory words, never below title size.

Never more than these. Italic is used only when a real italic face is bundled; the engine does not fake a slant.

Six sizes

Sizes are in design pixels at a window 1080 pixels high and scale with the window.

There is one Display per screen. Hierarchy comes from size and colour, not from making everything bold.

Alignment

• Text, lists and forms are flush left, ragged right. Only a lone title, a button's own label or a single short caption is centred.
• Numbers in columns align by their digits, with fixed-width figures.
• Icons sit in a fixed column at the same position in every row.
• Everything sits on a grid of multiples of 4.
• Labels on a row share a baseline; a name and its tag align on the baseline, not by their tops.

Captions and field labels are small capitals with a little extra letter spacing in the muted colour. Sentences are sentence case. Text on busy art or the world gets a shadow, outline or plate; text on flat panels does not.

Wording

Words are part of the picture. The voice is confident, warm and a little wry; short, concrete and active.

• Buttons are one to three words, a verb first: "Host a game", "Join", "Play again".
• Chips and tags are one or two words. Tooltips are one sentence.
• Neighbouring labels share a pattern, so a column of buttons looks even.
• One word per idea across the game: host, map, room, sign in.
• Errors say what happened and what to do: "Can't reach the server. Check your connection and try again."
• Fantasy flavour belongs in names and titles, never in instructions or errors.

For map makers

Keep unit names, quest titles and messages short. A name that does not fit is cut with an ellipsis and shown in full in its tooltip, so put the distinctive part first.