Fraunces
Fraunces is what happens when somebody takes the warm, slightly overfed serifs of Windsor and Cooper seriously enough to build a variable font out of them. It has four axes, and two of them are unusual: SOFT rounds the corners off the serifs and terminals by degrees, and WONK is a switch that swaps in the deliberately off-kilter alternates the design was drawn with. That second one is the whole personality of the face and it can be turned off.
Alphabets
- Latin
- Latin Extendedaccented characters for most European languages
- Turkishincluding ı, İ, ğ, ş and the rest
- Vietnamesethe full set of stacked accents
Style
Weight — 400
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, Turkish, Vietnamese
- Download size
- 539 KB
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
@font-face {
font-family: 'Fraunces';
/* 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/fraunces.woff2') format('woff2');
font-weight: 100 900;
font-style: normal;
font-display: swap;
}
body {
font-family: 'Fraunces', sans-serif;
}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
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 Turkish 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 Fraunces support Latin, Latin Extended, Turkish and Vietnamese?
- Yes. 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 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.