When should you use Type matches your brand?
email-typography · functional · optional
When should you use this check?
Run this once you have written down your approved font stacks, and put it in the path of anything that generates email for you. Outlook's Word engine ignores your fallback stack entirely and substitutes Times New Roman for any font it does not know, so a stack that looks fine in every other client can arrive looking like a legal notice. It is the sharpest gate available for AI-written sends, because brand drift shows up in the type before it shows up anywhere else — a plausible font stack that is simply not yours.
When should you not?
Skip it while you have not agreed your stacks, since the check reports as needing configuration until they are supplied. It is also not a layout or hierarchy review: it holds declared type against your list and against a readable floor, not whether the heading sizes make sense. Deliberately plain-text-styled outreach, which is meant to look like a personal message written in the client's default font, is usually better left out of the set than configured around.
What does it inspect?
Customer-configured typography verification: every font stack in the email must match an approved brand stack, webfonts must ship an Outlook defense, and weights/sizes must use client-safe vocabulary. Skips until approvedFontStacks is configured. See docs/EMAIL-TYPOGRAPHY.md.
What does a failure mean?
A failure names the type problem: a stack outside your approved list, a webfont declared with no web-safe fallback behind it, or copy set below the readable minimum. The stack failure matters because it is invisible to whoever built the template — it renders correctly on their machine and substitutes on a large share of business inboxes. A missing fallback is the same failure waiting to happen, and the size failure is the one recipients feel immediately on a phone.
What are the Standard defaults — and why?
Three parameters carry the check. `approvedFontStacks` defaults to an empty list at `required` severity, a deliberate gate: there is no universal correct typeface, so rather than guess, the check reports as needing configuration until your brand supplies its stacks. `webSafeFonts` defaults to the consensus canon shared by the major email typography references and feeds the Outlook-defence check, and `minFontSizePx` defaults to `13`, the vendor-tested threshold below which iOS Mail begins auto-upscaling text.
How does an agent call it?
{
"type": "email",
"validations": [
"email-typography"
]
}
Who governs the Standard?
Schemafirst.org publishes community-governed standards for digital QA. ArbiterQA is a sponsor and commercial licensee of those standards; citation does not mean Schemafirst operates ArbiterQA.
Author ArbiterQA · Reviewed by ArbiterQA · 2026-08-14