Fraunces

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Specification

Designer

Undercase Type, Phaedra Charles, Flavia Zimbardi

Foundry

Undercase Type

Released

2020

Category

Display

License

OFL-1.1

Commercial use

Allowed

Good for

Headlines, Editorial display, Branding, Book covers

Weights

100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900

Styles

Normal, Italic

Variable

Yes

Glyphs

698

Languages

Latin, Latin Extended, Türkçe, Vietnamese

Download size

539 KB

Source

github.com/google/fonts/tree/main/ofl/fraunces

Questions

Is Fraunces free for commercial use?

Yes. Fraunces 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 Fraunces in a logo?

Yes. The licence covers the font software, not the artwork you make with it, so a logo set in Fraunces belongs to you — including if you later register it as a trademark. You do not need permission and you do not owe anything to Undercase Type, Phaedra Charles, Flavia Zimbardi. What the licence stops you doing is redistributing the font file itself as a product.

How do I install Fraunces?

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. Fraunces is a variable font: those files carry all 9 weights at once. Some older software — Word, Canva, and Photoshop before 2018 — reads only the one weight the file defaults to, and for Fraunces that is Black (900), not the regular. If that happens, use the Static download on this page instead: it has 36 ordinary files, one per weight, and works everywhere.

Does Fraunces support Turkish?

Yes. Fraunces 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.

What languages does Fraunces support?

Fraunces covers Latin, Latin Extended, Turkish and Vietnamese, across 698 glyphs. Anything outside those alphabets is not included — the character map further up this page shows exactly what you get.

What weights does Fraunces come in?

Fraunces comes in 9 weights: Thin (100), Extra Light (200), Light (300), Regular (400), Medium (500), Semi Bold (600), Bold (700), Extra Bold (800) and Black (900). It is a variable font, so every one of them is in a single file and you can also set any weight in between.

Where can I download Fraunces as WOFF2?

From the WOFF2 button on this page — the file is fraunces.woff2, and it is about 230 KB. It is the complete font repacked for the web rather than a cut-down copy: the same glyphs, the same spacing and the same hinting as the .ttf in the download, roughly 60% smaller. Every browser still receiving updates reads WOFF2, so it is the only web format most sites need. Google Fonts does not offer this file for download at all — it serves WOFF2 from its own servers and gives you .ttf if you ask for the family.

What do the SOFT and WONK axes in Fraunces do?

SOFT runs from 0 to 100 and rounds the sharp corners of the serifs and terminals as it climbs, so the same weight can be crisp or pillowy. WONK is a switch rather than a slider, 0 or 1: at 1 it substitutes the intentionally skewed alternates the family was drawn around, including the leaning l and the swung-out leg of the R. Neither axis is in the preview on this page, which is pinned to the defaults so the file stays small. Both work in the download, in any application that reads variable axes, and on the web with font-variation-settings.