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Typography

Isometric type specimens

Letterforms set on the three faces of a block.

Responsive isometric scenes need a plan for narrow screens. Sometimes the answer is to scale everything down with clamp(), and sometimes it is to hide secondary blocks entirely. What rarely works is letting the scene overflow sideways, which makes the page scroll horizontally and feels broken on a phone.

9 imagesJPG, 1200 × 1200

Colour contrast still applies to illustrations that carry meaning. A bar chart drawn as blocks needs enough contrast between the bars and the floor, and labels on the faces need the same contrast as body text. Decorative scenes have more freedom, but we still avoid pale blocks on a pale background.

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Written by

Inês Duarte

Inês is Cubefold's colour and type lead. She believes every isometric scene needs exactly one warm accent, and not two.

All 16 posts by Inês Duarte

9 comments

  1. Nina Ahlberg

    Tiny typo in the second code block: the unit is missing on the translate value.

    Reply to Nina Ahlberg
  2. Chen Wei

    Short and useful. More quick tips like this, please.

    Reply to Chen Wei
  3. Mateo Rossi

    This finally made the order of rotations click for me. I had them the wrong way round for weeks.

    Reply to Mateo Rossi
  4. Alex Moreau

    Is there a way to do the shadow without a pseudo-element? Our CMS strips empty spans.

    Reply to Alex Moreau
    1. Inês DuarteAuthor

      Yes, container queries work well; we will cover them soon.

      Reply to Inês Duarte
      1. Inês DuarteAuthor

        Same here. Adding will-change on the wrapper fixed it for me.

        Reply to Inês Duarte
  5. Eli Novak

    Love the palette. Could you share the exact lightness values?

    Reply to Eli Novak
    1. Inês DuarteAuthor

      The templates are in the downloads section of the reference post.

      Reply to Inês Duarte
  6. Pia Jensen

    I tried this on an old iPad and one of the faces flickers on hover. Any idea why?

    Reply to Pia Jensen

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