Question: If it doesn’t affect character widths, why isn’t the Weight axis a “Grade” axis?

[Stephen Nixon]

I have received the following question:

If the Weight axis doesn’t affect horizontal metrics / character widths, why isn’t it a “Grade” axis?

There are basically three reasons:

1. People intuitively understand the Weight axis, but most haven’t yet heard of Grade. Recursive is meant to be a font with a lot of features which are accessible to newcomers, so the simpler, more-understood axis makes more sense to use.
2. Recursive is a monospace font at its core, and plenty of monospace fonts have Weight axes which don’t change character widths, but which aren’t Grade axes. The proportional versions of Recursive (MONO > 0) are not traditional proportional styles, which prioritize a continuous appearance of proportions & spacing across weights (requiring widths to change), but more like “proportional monospace” or “semi-monospace” styles, prioritizing continuity of character widths across styles (allowing some change in the appearance of spacing & apparent width between weights).
3. Even type designers who do talk about Grade, definitions differ. Some define Grade as being a small change to glyph outlines to facilitate rendering on different materials or screen conditions. Others define Grade as basically a full Weight axis that doesn’t affect character widths. I tend to side with the former camp. So, Recursive could get a Grade axis in the future which is something like +/- 50 in Weight. However, it isn’t currently clear to me what benefit that would have – it seems that a web developer wanting a small up/down shift in color would find it simpler to just use different font-weight values.