Laconia began as the personal typeface of designer Ross Mills, expressing his particular thoughts about how a sans serif should feel: with a consistent tension in its curves, exquisitely balanced shapes, and usable across a wide range of sizes and circumstances. In fact, much of the text on the Tiro website and captions in specimens are set using it and you’re reading it right now.

You can drop your text into Laconia, and it will be instantly readable and clear, but Laconia is never boring or mundane. It builds a solid foundation for your design work and tackles everything from large headlines, to bold buttons, to long-form text and micro captions with confidence and distinctive character at each size.

From the airy and open Thin to the solid and robust Extra Bold, it covers a wide range of expressions. The design straddles the line between round and square forms, giving personality without drawing attention to itself. In its lightest weights, Laconia can be set extremely large without overpowering other elements on the page; while utilising the heaviest weights allows you to pack a punch while still retaining legibility. Unlike many sans serif typefaces that only work well at larger sizes, Laconia excels when set in body copy and long-running text due to its open structure and comfortable spacing.

From the start, Laconia also had a second purpose. After hearing Cherokee speakers at a 2010 type conference describe the lack of fonts for their language on screens and devices, Ross created Laconia to carry Cherokee script alongside Latin, not as an add-on, but inherent in the design concept. Laconia Cherokee is available under Tiro’s pay-what-you-want model for Indigenous language fonts.