Bravura
Designed By
Daniel Spreadbury et al.
1 Style Display
¼ ½ ¾ ⅛ ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♭ ♮ ♯ 𝄀 𝄁 𝄂 𝄃 𝄄 𝄅 𝄆 𝄇 𝄈 𝄉 𝄊 𝄋 𝄌
Bravura · Regular
Try a short headline and compare the letterforms at a larger scale.
1 style available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.
Download Bravura ↓OTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
¼ ½ ¾ ⅛ ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♭ ♮ ♯ 𝄀 𝄁 𝄂 𝄃 𝄄 𝄅 𝄆 𝄇 𝄈 𝄉 𝄊 𝄋 𝄌
A Headline In Place
Bravura · Regular
A poster setting with supporting text.
Character Selection
¼ ½ ¾ ⅛ ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♭ ♮ ♯ 𝄀 𝄁 𝄂 𝄃 𝄄 𝄅 𝄆 𝄇 𝄈 𝄉 𝄊 𝄋 𝄌
Try your own text above to check connected letterforms and spacing in context.
1 Style,
One Family
Every available style is shown below in its own font file.
Regular400
¼ ½ ¾ ⅛ ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♭ ♮ ♯ 𝄀 𝄁 𝄂 𝄃 𝄄 𝄅 𝄆 𝄇 𝄈 𝄉 𝄊 𝄋 𝄌
Type a word in Bravura and nothing much happens. There are no letters in it. What it holds is 3,712 characters of music notation: clefs, noteheads, rests, accidentals, dynamics, articulation marks and a long tail of rarer signs.
Daniel Spreadbury drew it at Steinberg for the notation program that shipped in 2016 as Dorico, and he introduced it on the Steinberg blog in May 2013. The name is Italian for bold, and in music it also means a showpiece passage; the announcement says both senses fit.
Where the shapes came from. Not-a-set, a dry transfer system for music, gave the basic glyphs. The sheets were scanned, studied under high magnification and redrawn by hand, and expert engravers looked over the results. The finished font is darker than most music fonts on purpose, in the manner of music engraved before computers. Noteheads are oval and large for the staff space. Corners are few and soft, an imitation of ink spreading on paper.
Bravura is also the reference font for SMuFL, the Standard Music Font Layout, which Spreadbury developed alongside it. SMuFL puts each symbol at a fixed spot in the Unicode Private Use Area, so a program can take any compliant music font in place of another. It grew out of the older layout Cleo Huggins made for Adobe’s Sonata in 1985 and is now looked after by the W3C Music Notation Community Group.
For a few symbols inline in ordinary text, Steinberg keeps a separate family, Bravura Text. This file is the engraving font, version 1.482, with 9 stylistic sets and a layer of ligatures.
Characters & Figures
3,712 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 234 recorded characters.
¼ ½ ¾ ⅛ ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♭ ♮ ♯ 𝄀 𝄁 𝄂 𝄃 𝄄 𝄅 𝄆 𝄇 𝄈 𝄉 𝄊 𝄋 𝄌
View The Recorded Character Selection
The Font Files
Download
Bravura
1 OTF style with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 419 KB ↓- Version
- 1.482
- License
- SIL Open Font License 1.1
Install On Your Computer
Extract the ZIP first. On Windows, select the font files and choose Install from the context menu. On macOS, open the files in Font Book and choose Install.
Use On A Website
Keep the font files and the included stylesheet together. Update the stylesheet path to match your project.
<link rel="stylesheet"
href="/fonts/bravura/bravura.css">
body {
font-family: 'Bravura', sans-serif;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.