Open Sans
Designed By
Steve Matteson
12 Styles Sans Serif
Letters for
every day.
Open Sans · Regular
Compare the family in headings, short labels and paragraph text.
12 styles available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.
Download Open Sans ↓TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
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A Clear Hierarchy
Open Sans · 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.
12 Styles,
One Family
Every available style is shown below in its own font file.
Light300
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Light Italic300
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Regular400
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Italic400
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Medium500
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Medium Italic500
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Semi Bold600
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Semi Bold Italic600
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Bold700
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Bold Italic700
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Extra Bold800
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Extra Bold Italic800
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Does a settings screen need a font with opinions? Steve Matteson, type director at Ascender Corp when he drew Open Sans, seems to have decided it did not. The stress stands upright, the forms are kept open, and the whole family has a friendly, neutral look that stays out of the way of whatever the words are saying. It was tuned for print, the web and phone interfaces at once, and it has been on Google Fonts since February 2011.
The Hebrew came later. It arrived in March 2021, when the family was rebuilt as a variable font, and with Greek, Cyrillic and Vietnamese already there, 1 family can carry the same app screens in Tel Aviv and in Athens without a second face for the odd language out.
These files hold 6 weights, Light to Extra Bold, with an italic for each. The italics are narrower than the romans by about 5.6%, which is handy: an emphasized word reads as a change of voice and the line does not get longer for it.
There are more figure options than most people dig out. Old style and tabular figures, a slashed zero, fractions, 4 stylistic sets.
For headlines we would look elsewhere. It has little to say at 60 px. Under body copy, form labels and menus, which is most of any website, it is hard to fault.
Characters & Figures
1,010 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 400 recorded characters.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ ? !
View The Recorded Character Selection
The Font Files
Download
Open Sans
12 TTF styles with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 937 KB ↓- Version
- 3.003
- 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/open-sans-2/open-sans-2.css">
body {
font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.
Heading & Body
Compare a larger heading with the same family at reading size.
Open Sans Heading · Open Sans 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.