Hunt #2 · 20 Sep 2026 · companion to gabarito-research.pages.dev

The heavy end:
700 · 800 · 900

Who actually pushes Gabarito past Bold, what it does to the letterforms when they do, and how to set it so it doesn't clog.

Headline finding, and it's a sharp one: every curated, design-vetted use of Gabarito I can verify stops at 700. Not one of the gallery-listed sites loads 800 or 900. The heavy weights are being used — just not by the people getting featured. They live in motion graphics, app UI stat numbers, and one-weight display loads. So 800/900 is close to unclaimed territory, and the reason is half taste, half a real optical limit you can see in the numbers below.

1 · Weight forensics of the documented uses

I refetched every site from hunt #1 and read what weights they actually request and apply. This is served-source evidence, not a gallery claim.

Site	Weights it actually uses	Ceiling
tinyshots.app	500 / 600 / 700 (self-hosted via next/font)	700
siteclub.co	400 / 600 / 700	700
naipefoundry.com (the foundry itself)	inline specimen at font-bold	700
Aurélien Liguori portfolio	Gabarito + DM Mono, display set Bold	700
studiokwi / FU Berlin posters	print — heaviest documented display setting, "type in a band", hyper-extended glyphs	≈800+

note TinyShots is the most committed Gabarito site on the web and it never goes above font-bold. Take that as data, not as gospel — it's one designer's call, repeated by a very small sample.

2 · Where 800/900 actually gets used

Found by code-searching public source for Gabarito:wght@900 / @800 / font-black / Gabarito-ExtraBold — i.e. catching real implementations rather than curated screenshots. Three repeatable patterns fell out.

A. Burned-in video captions (the strongest heavy use I found)

• HeyGen — Hyperframes, caption-emoji-pop component HTML-to-video framework by HeyGen. The caption component loads Gabarito 900 and nothing else, sets it UPPERCASE at 72px, letter-spacing:-0.03em, white with a 3px black -webkit-text-stroke and paint-order:stroke fill, plus per-word colour accents. This is Gabarito Black doing the TikTok/Reels caption job — and it's the single most considered heavy-weight setting in the wild.

B. Big numbers in app UI

• good-partner (React Native app) Uses font-gabarito font-black at text-4xl/text-5xl for XP counts, stat tiles and screen titles — Regular/Medium everywhere else. The pattern: Black is reserved for one number or one line per screen. That's the cleanest heavy-weight discipline I found.
• FIEZEL — redesign mockups font-gabarito font-black tracking-tight for the wordmark ("FIEZEL.") and for the primary CTA label. Proof Gabarito Black survives being a logotype and a button at the same time.

C. Loaded alone, as a pure display face

The recurring signal: when people reach for the heavy end, they request family=Gabarito:wght@900 as the only weight on the page and pair it with something else for text — Workbench, Roboto, Poppins, Kanit, Chakra Petch. Nobody ramps 400→900 within one family. Examples in public source: Apricot CasterV2, datainkio 11ty portfolio, Palm Tree Studio, plus a long tail of banner/hero CSS packs.

And for 800 specifically: Angular Experts' resource showcase (Gabarito 800 + Sora), marmelab/FakeRest (500/600/700/900 — the only project I saw skip 800 and jump straight to Black for its display line).

3 · What the heavy weights measure

Pulled from the variable source (Gabarito[wght].ttf, upem 1000) by instancing each weight and measuring the outlines. This is where the "don't push it too far" advice comes from — it's not a matter of taste, it's counter space.

wght	stem (l)	o counter	o sidebearings	H advance	cap height
400 Regular	149	201	70	698	681
700 Bold	193	128	48	678	681
800 ExtraBold	208	104	40	671	681
900 Black	226	74	31	663	681

Read it like this:

• 1 The counter collapses, fast. The inside of the o goes 201 → 128 → 104 → 74. Black's counter is 37% of Regular's, and ExtraBold→Black alone drops it another 29%. That's the whole story of why Black clogs at small sizes, in print at low ink coverage, and on dark backgrounds (where white-on-dark optically fattens the stems further).
• 2 It gets heavier by eating space, not by getting wider. H advance actually shrinks 698 → 663 from Regular to Black. Gabarito Black is 5% narrower per cap than Regular — unusual, and genuinely useful: your headline doesn't blow out its line when you go heavy. Nice for a compact logotype.
• 3 Sidebearings halve. 70 → 31 units of air around the o. The font is already tracking itself tighter as you go up, so don't stack much negative letter-spacing on top. −0.02 to −0.03em at display size is the ceiling before the letters start touching; at anything under ~24px you want 0 or slightly positive.
• 4 x-height and cap height don't move (488→490, 681 flat). No optical compensation — the heavy weights are pure weight gain, so the ladder from Medium to Black reads as emphasis, never as a size change. Good for hierarchy, means you must carry contrast with size.

4 · The lab — look before you commit

5 · Rules for the heavy end

• do Pick one heavy weight and hold it. Every credible use loads a single heavy weight and pairs it downward (900 + a text face, or 700 + 400/500). Nobody ships 700/800/900 together — three near-identical heavies read as inconsistency, not hierarchy.
• do Use 800 if you want the room nobody's in. 700 is where every vetted site sits; 900 is where the caption/banner crowd sits. ExtraBold holds the counters (104 vs 74) and still hits harder than Bold. For a logotype that needs to survive small sizes, it's the better bet.
• do Keep Black above ~28px, tracked −0.02 to −0.03em, uppercase or tight sentence case. That's the HeyGen setting and it's right.
• don't Don't put Black on a dark background at small size without dropping to 800 — the counter is already at 74 units before the optical bloom.
• don't Don't expect a light weight to balance it. The family is 400–900; there is no 300/200. Your contrast ladder has to come from size and colour, not from a hairline counterpart. Pimp my Type flags the same gap, plus the missing italics.
• test Stroke-and-fill is a legitimate trick here. -webkit-text-stroke + paint-order:stroke fill at 900 is what makes it read over video/photo. If your brand ever touches motion, that recipe is proven.

6 · Verdict for the brand

Your distinctive asset at the heavy end is ExtraBold 800. Bold is what the two or three people who've been seen using Gabarito already chose, Black is what the caption/banner long tail grabs, and 800 sits in between with nobody on it and better counters than 900. A compact wordmark benefits from Gabarito's counter-intuitive narrowing at weight (H advance drops 5% from 400 to 900), so a Black or ExtraBold logotype takes less horizontal room than the Regular would — rare, and worth exploiting.

7 · Sources for this hunt

• naipefoundry/gabarito · google/fonts — ofl/gabaritoThe variable source I measured. Named instances: Regular 400, Medium 500, SemiBold 600, Bold 700, ExtraBold 800, Black 900. One axis, wght 400–900, default 400.
• HeyGen Hyperframes — caption-emoji-popThe 900 caption recipe, in full source.
• Pimp my Type — Gabarito"May appear too bold for very large displays", no light weight, no italics. The measurements above are why.
• Google Fonts specimen · Naipe store specimenType-test the heavy weights against your own strings before committing.
• Hunt #1 — the full Gabarito censusEvery documented use, specimen, pairing and near-match.