What font does GitHub use?

Mona Sans is a variable grotesque with a weight axis and a width axis, named after the Octocat. GitHub commissioned it for its own brand and shipped it under the SIL Open Font License at GitHub Universe in 2022, alongside Hubot Sans. That is the unusual part: a company paying for a custom face normally keeps it, and the licence is what stops this page from being the usual bad news.

It is drawn for the job GitHub actually has, which is interface text that occasionally has to shout. The narrow widths hold together at display sizes where a normal grotesque falls apart, and the regular weight is quiet enough for a paragraph — so one family covers a headline, a button and a line of documentation without anybody having to reach for a second.

What it does not cover is the Octocat, and the wordmark beside it is not simply Mona Sans typed out either. A logo is drawn once and then frozen; a typeface has to work for every word nobody has thought of yet. Those are different jobs, and this is the page for the second one.