Licenses

Recursive

Stephen Nixon · Arrow Type · 2019 · OFL-1.1 · Variable

Five axes, and two of them do things almost nothing else does. MONO slides the whole family from proportional to monospaced, so one file is both the interface face and the code face and the two share every letterform. CASL slides it from neutral to casual, taking the skeleton back towards the single-stroke brush writing of sign painters that it started from. There is also a slant axis, a cursive axis and a weight axis that runs to 1000 rather than stopping at 900. It is the most variable font in this archive and the one worth opening a slider on.

Variable · 996 KB · 1 file

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

In Word or Canva it installs as Light (300), not the regular — take the static file below for those.

Static · 2.6 MB · 28 files

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

The license file is inside both zips.

See Recursive with Lorem Ipsum

Alphabets

Latin, Latin Extended and Turkish have no lists of their own. An alphabet gets one when enough fonts here carry it and not nearly all of them do — otherwise the page would just be the archive again.

Style

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

Weight — 400

Specification

Designer
Stephen Nixon
Foundry
Arrow Type
Released
2019
Category
Sans-serif
License
OFL-1.1
Commercial use
Allowed
Good for
Interfaces, Code, Documentation, Branding
Weights
300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000
Styles
Normal
Variable
Yes
Glyphs
1,304
Languages
Latin, Latin Extended, Turkish, Vietnamese
Download size
996 KB
Source
github.com/google/fonts/tree/main/ofl/recursive

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

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

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Recursive';
  /* 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/recursive.woff2') format('woff2');
  font-weight: 300 1000;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: 'Recursive', 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

Designed by Stephen Nixon

Copyright 2019 The Recursive Project Authors (github.com/arrowtype/recursive)

Read the full license text · What these licenses mean

The license file is included inside the download.

Questions

Is Recursive free for commercial use?
Yes. Recursive 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 Recursive in a logo?
Yes. The licence covers the font software, not the artwork you make with it, so a logo set in Recursive belongs to you — including if you later register it as a trademark. You do not need permission and you do not owe anything to Stephen Nixon. What the licence stops you doing is redistributing the font file itself as a product.
How do I install Recursive?
Download the zip and unzip it. On a Mac, select the 1 font file 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. Recursive is a variable font: the single file carries all 8 weights at once. Some older software — Word, Canva, and Photoshop before 2018 — reads only the one weight the file defaults to, and for Recursive that is Light (300), not the regular. If that happens, use the Static download on this page instead: it has 28 ordinary files, one per weight, and works everywhere.
Does Recursive support Turkish?
Yes. Recursive 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 Recursive support Latin, Latin Extended, Turkish and Vietnamese?
Yes. Recursive covers Latin, Latin Extended, Turkish and Vietnamese, across 1,304 glyphs. Anything outside those alphabets is not included — the character map further up this page shows exactly what you get.
What do the MONO and CASL axes in Recursive do?
MONO runs from 0 to 1 and changes the spacing model: at 0 every letter has its natural width, at 1 they all share one, so the same font is a proportional sans or a monospace depending on where you leave it. CASL runs 0 to 1 and changes the drawing rather than the spacing, relaxing the letterforms towards the brush-written signpainting the family is based on. Neither is in the preview on this page, which is pinned to the defaults to keep the file small. Both work in the download and on the web with font-variation-settings: "MONO" 1, "CASL" 1.

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