Work Sans

The accents on Work Sans are drawn larger than a print typeface would draw them. That is a screen decision, and Wei Huang, a type designer from Australia, made plenty of them: the middle of the family, Regular and the weights on either side of it, was tuned for text on a monitor somewhere between 14 and 48 px, and the far ends of the range were left for display work on the web and on paper.

The skeleton is older than the purpose. Huang based it, loosely, on the early grotesques cast by British and German foundries, Stephenson Blake’s among them, those slightly stiff sans serifs from before the neutral Swiss ones took over. You can see some of it in how wide and plain the letters sit, and in a lowercase that makes no effort to look friendly.

Google added the family in July 2015. Within a month the Thin had been redrawn even thinner, absorbing what used to be a separate Hairline family, and in 2020 the whole thing went variable. What you download here are the 18 static files, 9 weights from 100 to 900, each with its italic.

Then there is the feature list, longer than most free sans families bother with: 6 stylistic sets, swashes, small caps, old style and tabular figures, a slashed zero, discretionary ligatures. Will a dashboard ever want the swashes? No. It will want the tabular figures and that slashed zero, and dashboards are where we would put this face, on labels and numbers at 14 to 18 px, keeping 800 and 900 for headings large enough to carry them.

Coverage is Latin with the extended accents, plus Vietnamese.