Harmattan
Designed By
SIL International
4 Styles Sans Serif
Letters for
every day.
Harmattan · Regular
Compare the family in headings, short labels and paragraph text.
4 styles available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.
Download Harmattan ↓TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
Harmattan dust on the window
A Clear Hierarchy
Harmattan · Regular
Headings, labels and running text.
Departures09:00 →
Before You Travel
The morning service leaves at nine. Tickets are available at the station, and the platform is listed on the departure board. Keep your ticket until the end of the journey.
4 Styles,
One Family
Every available style is shown below in its own font file.
Regular400
Harmattan dust on the window
Medium500
Harmattan dust on the window
Semi Bold600
Harmattan dust on the window
Bold700
Harmattan dust on the window
The harmattan is a trade wind that blows over West Africa in winter, and the name went to an Arabic font for the languages of that region, drawn in the Warsh style. Its earliest roots are in Fouta, a font made by the C&MA Guinea Fulbe Team in 2007 and 2008, and George W. Nuss, who drew the original, is still credited as its first designer.
SIL took the project on. Becca Hirsbrunner is now lead designer, Iska Routamaa contributed, and Bob Hallissy writes the Graphite and OpenType code. The rendering is kept plain on purpose: letters join with their basic connecting forms and the only ligatures are the required lam-alef ones. We think that plainness is kind to a new reader, and it keeps the text predictable in software that handles Arabic poorly.
Version 2.000 in June 2020 brought a Bold and near complete coverage of the Arabic blocks of Unicode 13.0. In 2023 Medium and Semi Bold joined, making 4 weights, the character set was brought up to Unicode 15.0 and Kyrgyz support was added, which carries the font well outside West Africa.
Latin is included too, enough for a French or English line next to the Arabic.
Characters & Figures
776 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 400 recorded characters.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ ? !
View The Recorded Character Selection
The Font Files
Download
Harmattan
4 TTF styles with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 895 KB ↓- Version
- 4.400
- 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/harmattan/harmattan.css">
body {
font-family: 'Harmattan', sans-serif;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.
Heading & Body
Compare a larger heading with the same family at reading size.
Harmattan Heading · Harmattan Body
Before You Travel
The morning service leaves at nine. Tickets are available at the station, and the platform is listed on the departure board. Keep your ticket until the end of the journey.