Stories & Novels

Stories & Novels is a refreshingly and unobtrusively designed online source of short stories by Franz Neumann. You can read the essays on your Kindle, with iBooks, or in a web browser. The clear, no-fuzz layout by Copy & Design resembles the kind of classical book typography rarely seen on the web: splendid margins, black on white type, drop caps, indents, italics, and ligatures with fonts served via Typekit.

Aside from the composition, Stories & Novels proves thatChaparralprovides a pleasant reading experience on screen. Designed in 2000 by Carol Twombly, it's a rugged, low-contrast serif of friendly, casual tone and humanist proportions. This makes it not only suitable for classic print products but also screen applications. The family provides a very wide and versatile palette of styles (formerly available in Multiple Master format) like four optical sizes — caption, text, subhead and display — five weights, small caps, a distinct italic and pithy bolds. The perfect tool kit for fine typography.

The Stories & Novels text is set at a generous size. If it were below 16px or so, the slightly sturdier Caption version might be a better choice. A recent study at Typedia found it to be one of the better performing text webfonts for a wide variety of rendering environments.

In case Chaparral doesn't serve all your typographic needs it is easily combinable with all kinds of sans serifs — humanist, grotesques, as well as geometric ones.