Recursive

Size ladder

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, Türkçe, Vietnamese

Download size

996 KB

Source

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

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 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 Recursive support?

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 weights does Recursive come in?

Recursive comes in 8 weights: Light (300), Regular (400), Medium (500), Semi Bold (600), Bold (700), Extra Bold (800), Black (900) and Extra Black (1000). 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 Recursive as WOFF2?

From the WOFF2 button on this page — the file is recursive.woff2, and it is about 702 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 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.