Recursive
Designed By
Arrow Type, Stephen Nixon
7 Styles Sans Serif
Letters for
every day.
Recursive · Regular
Compare the family in headings, short labels and paragraph text.
7 styles available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.
Download Recursive ↓TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
Build passed in 42 seconds
A Clear Hierarchy
Recursive · 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.
7 Styles,
One Family
Every available style is shown below in its own font file.
Light300
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Regular400
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Medium500
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Semi Bold600
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Bold700
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Extra Bold800
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Black900
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Sign painters have a quick brush hand called single-stroke casual, loose and warm and able to switch style on a whim, and Recursive is built on it. That is an unlikely root for a type family aimed at code editors and data-heavy screens. Stephen Nixon and Arrow Type, a foundry in Brooklyn, made it work by turning the brush style into a large variable family, with a proportional side and a monospaced side for programming.
The full family has 5 variable axes and comes as Recursive Sans and Recursive Mono; the complete range and the embed options are on its own website. This download gives you the static sans, 7 weights from Light to Black.
The feature list is the surprise: 13 stylistic sets of alternate letters, a slashed zero, fractions and discretionary ligatures. With Sans and Mono in the same family, documentation that mixes prose and code samples can stay in 1 typeface.
A later update to the Google release fixed printing problems, evened out the default line heights between styles on macOS, improved combining accents and added localized forms for several languages. We would use it for a developer tool’s interface or a dashboard; for a novel, no.
Characters & Figures
745 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 400 recorded characters.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ ? !
View The Recorded Character Selection
The Font Files
Download
Recursive
7 TTF styles with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 656 KB ↓- Version
- 1.085
- 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/recursive/recursive.css">
body {
font-family: 'Recursive', sans-serif;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.
Heading & Body
Compare a larger heading with the same family at reading size.
Recursive Heading · Recursive 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.