colophon · notes on the type
Notes on the type.
A company that reads documents for a living ought to set its own pages with some care. This is a short account of why the site looks the way it does — the two voices it speaks in, the grammar it borrows, and the things it refuses to do.
Two voices, and nothing in between.
There are only two typefaces on this site, and the line between them is the whole idea. Everything written by a person is set in Newsreader, a serif drawn by Production Type for sustained reading on a screen. It is the human voice: the headlines, the sentences, the paragraphs you are reading now. We set it roman and in sentence case, the way a book is set, because the work we describe is patient work and the page should feel that way too.
Everything the machine says is set in IBM Plex Mono, drawn for IBM by Mike Abbink with Bold Monday. It is the voice of registers and terminals and typewritten files — fixed-width, lowercase, unhurried. The labels, the data, the references, the buttons that act: all of it is the machine annotating the page rather than speaking over it. There is no sans-serif anywhere, and no italic accent words dropped into a headline for effect. A firm that reads documents for a living should be able to typeset its own document without reaching for a third voice to sound interesting.
We borrowed the grammar of the work.
The sections here are not called features. They are exhibits and schedules; the page numbers in the corner are real folios; the double rule that opens each one is the thick-and-thin line a paper ledger draws when a new account begins. A case file carries a folder tab. A live engagement carries a received stamp, set a hair off square the way a real one lands.
None of this is costume. The firms Niska serves live inside dockets, workpapers, and compliance matrices — the document is the product, and the filing is the work. So the site is built in the grammar of that work rather than the grammar of a brochure. It is meant to read like something from the file room it describes, because that is where the system actually goes to work.
Emphasis is a trace, not a flourish.
When something on this page matters, it is not made louder or tilted into italics. It is marked — a single cobalt sweep of the highlighter, the trace a careful reader leaves when they go back over a page and find the line that counts. It is the only emphasis the site allows itself, and it appears at most once in any section, because a page marked everywhere is a page no one has really read.
The same rule governs the instrument at the top of the home page. Every answer it files arrives with its source attached, linked back to the page it came from. Showing the source is the house's entire argument — that you should never have to take the machine's word for anything — so it would be strange for the website not to hold itself to the same rule. The mark and the citation are the same gesture: read it, then show your work.
Most of the craft is in what is left out.
There is a great deal this site refuses. No badges, no wall of borrowed logos, no counters ticking up to prove momentum, no stock-photo confidence. We left them out for the same reason the system refuses to answer without a source: a claim that has to be dressed up is usually a claim that cannot stand on its own. The quieter a page is, the more you can trust the few things it does say.
So the page keeps to two voices, one mark, a ruled spine, and the plainest sentences we can write. Everything else is restraint — which is only the typographic version of the promise the whole company is built on.
Niska reads the documents your business runs on, and never takes them out of your hands.
colophon · set in newsreader & ibm plex mono