Pair Space Grotesk with Inter, from one variable file each

[seenu-k]

Typography and the default theme, as the first step of the brand work. Colour on the engine's own pages and the docs site follows from the decision made here.

The static weights were working around a fixed bug

Nine static Inter weights were fetched from fonts.gstatic.com by content hash. That existed because FontWeight did not drive the wght axis — one variable file meant one rendered weight. It landed in Flutter 3.41, and this package already requires 3.44.

So the workaround outlived the problem, and cost:

	Before	After
Files	9	2
Payload	2.7 MB	988 KB
Families	Inter	Inter + Space Grotesk
opsz axis	absent from the hashed build	present, resting at its default of 14

Both are declared with no weight: entries — adding them puts Flutter back into matching a file per weight and defeats the axis.

Measured, not assumed

A variable font whose axis is ignored still lays out; it just lays out the same at every weight. That is exactly the failure the static weights were hiding, so the test measures rendered width rather than trusting the release notes:

• Inter w300 < w400 < w700
• Space Grotesk w300 < w700
• w450 lands between w400 and w500 — an intermediate weight no static file ever provided
• the two families measure differently, which is how a font wiring mistake usually hides: everything still renders, in the same face

A flutter build web of the example confirms both faces reach the bundle and register under the package-qualified names the theme uses.

Why the roles split where they do

Space Grotesk takes display and headline only. It is drawn for size — tight sidebearings, single-storey g — which reads as character in a headline and as noise in a paragraph. Inter is drawn for UI at small sizes and keeps everything a player reads at length, including the title role, which labels list rows rather than heading a screen.

The families are applied through the text theme rather than ThemeData.fontFamily, so sizes, weights, tracking and line heights stay exactly as Material 3 defines them. That is what should carry this through to Material Expressive, which changes the scale and shapes rather than the mechanism.

Defaults that look deliberate

Branding.seedColor now defaults to the EigenInteractive teal and Branding.displayFontFamily to Space Grotesk. A scaffolded game looks intentional before anyone has thought about colour, instead of looking like Material's baseline purple, and each is one line to make its own.

Worth recording for whoever picks a seed later: Material 3 treats it as a hue, not a colour. It pulls whatever you give it to tone 40 and rebuilds the ramp, so #2f6b5e, Colors.teal and Colors.tealAccent all arrive within a few percent of each other — and a near-black seed comes back chromatic, not neutral.

The download script is gone rather than updated

fonts.google.com/download?family=… answers with the site's HTML rather than an archive — I checked — so anything automated here would be scraping a page free to change. fonts/README.md documents provenance and the update procedure instead, beside the OFL notices the licence requires to travel with the files.

Verified

dart analyze clean, flutter test 197 passing (5 theme + 4 measurement tests new), flutter build web --release on the example.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code