Licenses

Besley

A free alternative to Clarendon

Owen Earl · indestructible type · 2019 · OFL-1.1 · Variable

Robert Besley patented Clarendon in 1845 and gave the nineteenth century its emphasis face; this is that design brought back by Owen Earl, with the weight put on an axis and an italic drawn for it that the original never had. The serifs are bracketed slabs — they meet the stem on a curve rather than at a corner, which is the detail separating a Clarendon from an Egyptian. The axis starts at 400 and climbs to 900 with nothing lighter, so the family is weighted towards emphasis — it will set a paragraph, but it was built to be the half of a pairing that raises its voice.

Variable · 120 KB · 2 files

All weights in one file, for Figma, Illustrator, InDesign and the web.

Static · 386 KB · 12 files

One file per weight, works everywhere including older Word and Photoshop.

The license file is inside both zips.

See Besley with Lorem Ipsum

Alphabets

Style

Click the text above to set it in your own words.

Weight — 400

Specification

Designer
Owen Earl
Foundry
indestructible type
Released
2019
Category
Serif
Alternative to
Clarendon
License
OFL-1.1
Commercial use
Allowed
Good for
Headlines, Editorial, Book covers, Body text
Weights
400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900
Styles
Normal, Italic
Variable
Yes
Glyphs
457
Languages
Latin, Latin Extended, Türkçe
Download size
120 KB
Source
github.com/google/fonts/tree/main/ofl/besley

Size ladder

96

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow

64

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow

40

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow

24

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow

16

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow

12

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow

Characters

Uppercase

  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D
  • E
  • F
  • G
  • H
  • I
  • J
  • K
  • L
  • M
  • N
  • O
  • P
  • Q
  • R
  • S
  • T
  • U
  • V
  • W
  • X
  • Y
  • Z

Lowercase

  • a
  • b
  • c
  • d
  • e
  • f
  • g
  • h
  • i
  • j
  • k
  • l
  • m
  • n
  • o
  • p
  • q
  • r
  • s
  • t
  • u
  • v
  • w
  • x
  • y
  • z

Numerals

  • 0
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9

Punctuation & symbols

  • .
  • ,
  • :
  • ;
  • !
  • ?
  • '
  • "
  • ‘
  • ’
  • “
  • ”
  • (
  • )
  • [
  • ]
  • {
  • }
  • /
  • \
  • |
  • -
  • –
  • —
  • _
  • @
  • #
  • $
  • %
  • &
  • *
  • +
  • =
  • <
  • >
  • ~
  • ^
  • `
  • €
  • £
  • ¥
  • ©
  • ®
  • °
  • §
  • †
  • •
  • …

Use it on the web

Self-hosted

You serve the file yourself. Nothing depends on this site staying up, and you get the whole character set — all Latin, Latin Extended, Türkçe.

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Besley';
  /* The download contains .ttf files. Put yours wherever you serve static
     files from and point this at it. Converting to .woff2 first cuts the
     size by roughly 60% and every current browser supports it. */
  src: url('/fonts/besley.woff2') format('woff2');
  font-weight: 400 900;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: 'Besley', serif;
}

Hosted by us

One line, nothing to upload. Put this in your <head>:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://thatsmyfont.com">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://thatsmyfont.com/fontfiles/besley.css">

Then use it in your CSS:

body {
  font-family: 'Besley', serif;
}

One thing to know: the file we host is cut down to Latin characters so pages load quickly. Besley also covers Türkçe, and for those you need the download and the self-hosted route.

License

OFL-1.1

You may use, modify and redistribute this font, including in commercial work. You may not sell the font file on its own, and any modified version must be released under the same license and under a different name.

Commercial use allowed

Designed by Owen Earl

Copyright 2020 The Besley Project Authors (https://github.com/indestructible-type)

Read the full license text · What these licenses mean

The license file is included inside the download.

Questions

Is Besley free for commercial use?
Yes. Besley is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which allows commercial use with no fee and no attribution requirement. You can use it in client work, in products you sell, on the web and in print. The one thing you may not do is sell the font file on its own. The licence is inside the download.
Can I use Besley in a logo?
Yes. The licence covers the font software, not the artwork you make with it, so a logo set in Besley belongs to you — including if you later register it as a trademark. You do not need permission and you do not owe anything to Owen Earl. What the licence stops you doing is redistributing the font file itself as a product.
How do I install Besley?
Download the zip and unzip it. On a Mac, select the 2 font files inside and open them, then press Install Font. On Windows, select them, right-click and choose Install. Restart any application that was already open before it will show up. Besley is a variable font: those files carry all 6 weights at once. Some older software — Word, Canva, and Photoshop before 2018 — reads only the one weight the file defaults to, and for Besley that is the regular weight. If that happens, use the Static download on this page instead: it has 12 ordinary files, one per weight, and works everywhere.
Does Besley support Turkish?
Yes. Besley includes the characters Türkçe needs that plain Latin does not — the dotless ı, the dotted İ, and ğ, ş, ü, ö and ç in both cases. This was checked against the font file itself, not assumed from the fact that it covers Latin.
Does Besley support Latin, Latin Extended and Turkish?
Yes. Besley covers Latin, Latin Extended and Turkish, across 457 glyphs. Anything outside those alphabets is not included — the character map further up this page shows exactly what you get.

Similar fonts