Open Sans
Steve Matteson drew Open Sans with an upright stress and open apertures, and that openness is the reason it survives being rendered at twelve pixels on a phone where a tighter humanist face closes up and turns to grey. It is the warm counterweight to Roboto's geometry — the same era, the same job, softer letterforms — and for most of a decade the two of them set the majority of text on the web between them. The 2021 rebuild turned it into a variable font with weight and width axes and added Hebrew, so the file here covers a good deal more than the version most people remember.
Alphabets
- Latin
- Latin Extendedaccented characters for most European languages
- Turkishincluding ı, İ, ğ, ş and the rest
- Cyrillic
- Cyrillic Extended
- Greek
- Vietnamesethe full set of stacked accents
- Hebrew
Weight — 400
Specification
- Designer
- Foundry
- Released
- Category
- License
- Commercial use
- Good for
- Weights
- Styles
- Variable
- Glyphs
- Languages
- Download size
- Source
Size ladder
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
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: 'Open Sans';
/* 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/open-sans.woff2') format('woff2');
font-weight: 300 800;
font-style: normal;
font-display: swap;
}
body {
font-family: 'Open Sans', 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 Open Sans free for commercial use?
- Yes. Open Sans 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 Open Sans in a logo?
- Yes. The licence covers the font software, not the artwork you make with it, so a logo set in Open Sans belongs to you — including if you later register it as a trademark. You do not need permission and you do not owe anything to Steve Matteson. What the licence stops you doing is redistributing the font file itself as a product.
- How do I install Open Sans?
- 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. Open Sans is a variable font: those files carry all 6 weights at once. Some older software — Word, Canva, and Photoshop before 2018 — only reads the first weight and will show it as Regular. If that happens, use the Static download on this page instead: it has 36 ordinary files, one per weight, and works everywhere.
- Does Open Sans support Turkish?
- Yes. Open Sans 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 Open Sans support Latin, Latin Extended, Turkish, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Vietnamese and Hebrew?
- Yes. Open Sans covers Latin, Latin Extended, Turkish, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Vietnamese and Hebrew, across 1,150 glyphs. Anything outside those alphabets is not included — the character map further up this page shows exactly what you get.