About
Octopus Deploy will standardise all bold font weights in the UI to use Semi-bold 600.
Why
As our branding moves towards using System Fonts in the UI, we require a more stable and standardized way to display regular and bold font weights. Medium-500 font weights are not always supported or visually consistent across different operating systems. If medium-500 is unavailable, the browser will automatically fall back to the next lowest, which will normally be regular-400.
Semi-bold-600 is visually better, and we can consistently render this weight for macOS and Windows. While not supported and/or available for all Linux users, the browser can automatically determine the next upward available font and render accordingly, in this case, bold-700. This method will also apply to any operating system that does not use system fonts.
The success of this change will:
- allow continual and consistent support across multiple operating systems
- consistently render:
- semi-bold-600 for macOS and Windows users
- bold-700 for some Linux users
- remove any need for supporting font smoothing
Using bold fonts
Our text style tokens allow the use of bold fonts in two areas:
- Headings - all headings use semi-bold weights
- Paragraph - there are additional bold weight variants for all applicable paragraph styles
You can learn more about our font styles on the Typography → Text Styles page.