Body type is where trust gets earned. A dashboard caller can't afford a font that fatigues at paragraph three — every line has to read clean on surface-1 at a glance and on a 4K monitor at three feet.
DM Sans carries the body load because it survives both places. Tall x-height for glanceable labels, friendly terminals for long-form marketing, disambiguated I / l / 1 for numerics that get compared against carrier IDs. No dropped characters, no fashion quirks.
We set lead copy at 22 / 33 and rely on text-wrap: pretty to keep the last lines from orphaning. Body runs at 16 / 26, capped at 70 ch — tight enough to keep the eye tracking, loose enough that stats breathe inside the paragraph.
Running prose supports emphasis via bold for key terms and italic for titles like On the Air. Links such as carrier partners use brand-hover underline. Inline code like POST /api/call renders mono. You can highlight a phrase the user searched for.
Footnotes and asides sit at 12.5 px muted — still AA on surface-1.
"We cut voicemail-to-live-conversation in half the week we switched."
— Ops lead, carrier customer
The measure of a column is the number of characters per line. At 16 px body with DM Sans, a column 380 px wide lands at roughly 62 characters — inside the 45–75 ch comfort band for sustained reading.
When a layout exceeds 720 px of reading-width, split it into two columns before the eye has to physically track across the page. Column rules use 1px dashed var(--md-border-subtle) — a quiet shepherd.
On narrow viewports, columns collapse at 960 px. Below that, a single column of body-md carries the load.