Typography
Primary Typeface
Digital products at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany use the open-sourced typeface “Lato”. It’s a well designed font that meets our needs as a global healthcare & life science company and plays in harmony with our custom secondary font, the “M-Font”. The Lato typeface kit can be accessed and downloaded from Google Fonts and is part of the Design Kit zip file, as well as the M-Font.
ABCĆDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSŠTUVWXYZ
abcćdefghijklmnopqrsštuvwxyz
1234567890‘?’“!”(%)[#]{@}/&\<-+÷×=>®©$€£¥¢:;,.*
Font Weight & Usage
Font weight is an important typographic style that can add emphasis and is used to differentiate content hierarchy. Font weight and size pairings must be carefully balanced. A bold weight will always have more emphasis than a lighter weight font of the same size.
The Lato family provides a wide range of weights — however, mainly black & regular should be used for our digital products. In case you need something in between or more light you can also use bold & light weights.
900 / Black
900 / Black Italic
400 / Regular
400 / Regular Italic
700 / Bold
700 / Bold Italic
300 / Light
300 / Light Italic
Styles & Usage
Our pursuit is progress for people.
XH1 Headline
Font Size: 92px
Font Weight: 900 / Black
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.15
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
XH2 Headline
Font Size: 72px
Font Weight: 900 / Black
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.25
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
XH3 Headline
Font Size: 64px
Font Weight: 900 / Black
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.25
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
XH4 Headline
Font Size: 48px
Font Weight: 900 / Black
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.25
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
XH5 Headline
Font Size: 40px
Font Weight: 900 / Black
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.25
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
XH6 Headline
Font Size: 36px
Font Weight: 900 / Black
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.25
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
H1 Headline
Font Size: 32px
Font Weight: 900 / Black
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.25
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
H2 Headline
Font Size: 26px
Font Weight: 900 / Black
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.25
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
H3 Headline
Font Size: 22px
Font Weight: 900 / Black
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.25
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
H4 Headline
Font Size: 18px
Font Weight: 900 / Black
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.25
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
H5 Headline
Font Size: 16px
Font Weight: 900 / Black
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.25
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
H6 Headline
Font Size: 14px
Font Weight: 900 / Black
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.25
We’ve been around for 350 years, yet our majority owners are still the descendants of Friedrich Jacob Merck, the man who founded our company in Darmstadt, Germany in 1668.
X-Large Paragraph
Font Size: 22px
Font Weight: 400 / Regular
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.75
We’ve been around for 350 years, yet our majority owners are still the descendants of Friedrich Jacob Merck, the man who founded our company in Darmstadt, Germany in 1668. Since then, we have become a truly global company, with 52,000 employees in 66 countries working on breakthrough solutions and technologies.
Large Paragraph
Font Size: 18px
Font Weight: 400 / Regular
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.75
We’ve been around for 350 years, yet our majority owners are still the descendants of Friedrich Jacob Merck, the man who founded our company in Darmstadt, Germany in 1668. Since then, we have become a truly global company, with 52,000 employees in 66 countries working on breakthrough solutions and technologies.
Medium Paragraph
Font Size: 16px
Font Weight: 400 / Regular
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.75
We’ve been around for 350 years, yet our majority owners are still the descendants of Friedrich Jacob Merck, the man who founded our company in Darmstadt, Germany in 1668. Since then, we have become a truly global company, with 52,000 employees in 66 countries working on breakthrough solutions and technologies.
Small Paragraph
Font Size: 14px
Font Weight: 400 / Regular
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.75
We’ve been around for 350 years, yet our majority owners are still the descendants of Friedrich Jacob Merck, the man who founded our company in Darmstadt, Germany in 1668. Since then, we have become a truly global company, with 52,000 employees in 66 countries working on breakthrough solutions and technologies.
X-Small Paragraph
Font Size: 12px
Font Weight: 400 / Regular
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.75
Date of Purchase
Label
Font Size: 12px
Font Weight: 400 / Regular
Character Spacing: 0.2em
Line Height: 1:1.75
Font Color
For large headlines you can choose from our color palette but keep the allowed color combinations in mind. If it comes to smaller headlines, paragraphs and labels you should keep the color in the black color shades. For headline-paragraph combinations we recommend to use two black shades. That could mean black default for the headline and a shade that is two steps lighter for the paragrap h, e.g. black lighter (see example below). When you change the color of an applied text style, you must not update it. This way you’re flexible in using different colors for the same Text-Style.
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
We’ve been around for 350 years, yet our majority owners are still the descendants of Friedrich Jacob Merck, the man who founded our company in Darmstadt, Germany in 1668.
Secondary Typeface
To highlight elements like headlines & numbers within a digital interface you can use our secondary typeface, our companie’s own M Font family. It’s a very vibrant and impetuous typeface that should only be used for larger font-sizes (e.g. financial numbers, headlines, etc.).
ABCĆDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSŠTUVWXYZ
abcćdefghijklmnopqrsštuvwxyz
1234567890‘?’“!”(%)[#]{@}/&\<-+÷×=>®©$€£¥¢:;,.*
400 / REGULAR
Styles & Usage
Our pursuit is progress for people.
XB1 Brand Headline
Font Size: 92px
Font Weight: 400 / Regular
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.1
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
XB2 Brand Headline
Font Size: 72px
Font Weight: 400 / Regular
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.15
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
XB3 Brand Headline
Font Size: 64px
Font Weight: 400 / Regular
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.15
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
B1 Brand Headline
Font Size: 48px
Font Weight: 400 / Regular
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.15
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
B2 Brand Headline
Font Size: 40px
Font Weight: 400 / Regular
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.15
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
B3 Brand Headline
Font Size: 36px
Font Weight: 400 / Regular
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.15
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
B4 Brand Headline
Font Size: 32px
Font Weight: 400 / Regular
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.15
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
B5 Brand Headline
Font Size: 26px
Font Weight: 400 / Regular
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.15
Our pursuit is progress for people everywhere.
B6 Brand Headline
Font Size: 22px
Font Weight: 400 / Regular
Character Spacing: 0.0em
Line Height: 1:1.15
Font Color
For the secondary typeface the same rules apply as for the primary typeface. Please make sure to use high-contrast combinations since the font itself needs the contrast to be as legible as possible.
Never use the M-Font in black color since this way the typeface appears too heavily weighted.