Public Sans

Size ladder

Specification

Designer

Dan Williams, Pablo Impallari

Foundry

U.S. Web Design System

Released

2019

Category

Sans-serif

Alternative to

Franklin Gothic

License

OFL-1.1

Commercial use

Allowed

Good for

User interfaces, Government and public services, Body text, Forms

Weights

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

Styles

Normal, Italic

Variable

Yes

Glyphs

648

Languages

Latin, Latin Extended, Türkçe, Vietnamese

Download size

109 KB

Source

github.com/uswds/public-sans

Questions

Is Public Sans free for commercial use?

Yes. Public 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 Public Sans in a logo?

Yes. The licence covers the font software, not the artwork you make with it, so a logo set in Public 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 Dan Williams, Pablo Impallari. What the licence stops you doing is redistributing the font file itself as a product.

How do I install Public 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. Public Sans 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 Public Sans that is Thin (100), not the regular. If that happens, use the Static download on this page instead: it has 18 ordinary files, one per weight, and works everywhere.

Does Public Sans support Turkish?

Yes. Public Sans 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 Public Sans support?

Public Sans covers Latin, Latin Extended, Turkish and Vietnamese, across 648 glyphs. Anything outside those alphabets is not included — the character map further up this page shows exactly what you get.

What weights does Public Sans come in?

Public Sans 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.

Is there a smaller, Latin-only version of Public Sans?

Yes — the "WOFF2 · Latin only" button on this page. It is 37 KB against 44 KB for the complete file, 17% smaller, with every weight the family has still in it. It covers Latin and Latin Extended, which is everything a page in English, Turkish or a western European language sets — Türkçe included, since ı, İ, ğ and ş all live in that range. Take the complete file instead if you set Cyrillic, Greek or any alphabet outside Latin.

Where can I download Public Sans as WOFF2?

From the WOFF2 button on this page — the file is public-sans.woff2, and it is about 44 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.