The family features four subtly different weights, or “grades”, allowing users to find the perfect weight for a particular situation, from 1, the lightest, to 4, the heaviest. The Medium weight can be used for reversing out of a dark background, subheads, and other cases where an additional level of typographic hierarchy is needed.

Guardian Agate Sans features two kinds of bolds. The standard Bolds are wider than the Regulars, as requested by The Guardian to make sport scores a bit more readable at 4.5pt. The Duplex Bolds set at exactly the same widths as the Regulars, useful for things like classified ads and stock listings where line length is at a premium. All numerals are tabular across all styles, so they can be freely mixed in tables of figures no matter which version is used.