Barlow Semi Condensed

Of the 3 Barlow widths, this is the one in between. Barlow itself is the normal width and Barlow Condensed the tightest, and Semi Condensed sits where a heading has to fit a narrow column without looking squeezed. Each width has 9 weights in roman and italic, 54 styles across the whole project, and Google added these 18 in October 2017.

The look is a slightly rounded, low contrast grotesk. Jeremy Tribby drew it in San Francisco from the public lettering of California, the car plates and highway signs and the buses and trains, and named it as a tribute to John Perry Barlow, songwriter and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Tribby had help. The spacing was worked out with a tool donated by Revolver Type, Dave Crossland and Thomas Phinney commented on early drafts, and the Vietnamese came from Nguyễn Hồng Nhung.

Inside there are small caps, tabular and proportional figures, fractions and superscripts, enough for tables and dense interface text. We think Semi Condensed is the most usable of the 3 for screens with a lot of numbers on them: narrow enough to fit, open enough to read at a glance.