Andika

Try Andika

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Andika Regular Italic
• Bold 700Andika Bold Bold Italic

About Andika

Andika is a sans serif family made for teaching reading. Its letters are drawn so that similar shapes are hard to mix up: in the specimen the a and g are single-storey, like handwritten forms, the bowls are open, and strokes have only slight modulation. According to the official description, Victor Gaultney drafted the first lowercase Latin alphabet and Annie Olsen refined and greatly extended it, adding a full extended Cyrillic set. The same source explains the motive: literacy workers had been combining letters from several fonts to cover the characters of one language. Andika now has four styles, Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic; further weights arrived with an upgrade in May 2022. The fonts hold 3,712 glyphs across Latin, Latin Extended, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended and Vietnamese. SIL International publishes Andika under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Andika works

Primers and literacy materials

Andika was designed for beginning readers, with letterforms kept easy to tell apart.

Minority-language publishing

A set of 3,712 glyphs covers extended Latin and Cyrillic characters that literacy projects otherwise had to borrow from several fonts.

Children's reading apps

Single-storey a and g match handwritten models, and four styles are enough for text, emphasis and headings.

Classroom handouts in Cyrillic

Cyrillic and Cyrillic Extended subsets let Russian, Ukrainian or Bulgarian materials use the same design as Latin ones.

Plain-language forms and notices

Open, uncluttered shapes help readers with limited reading experience work through instructions.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Turkish
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Romanian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Estonian
• Vietnamese
• Russian
• Ukrainian
• Bulgarian

Writing systems with glyphs in the family besides Latin: Cyrillic. These are listed as scripts, not as a promise for every language written in them.

Character sets found in the files: cyrillic, cyrillic-ext, latin, latin-ext, vietnamese. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with Andika

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use Andika on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Andika";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Andika-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Andika";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Andika-BoldItalic.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Andika";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Andika-Italic.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Andika";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Andika-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Andika", sans-serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Andika with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Andika:ital,wght@0,400;0,700;1,400;1,700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Two weights

Andika has Regular and Bold with italics. There are no light or intermediate weights.

No Greek

Latin, Cyrillic and Vietnamese are covered; Greek is not among the subsets.

Changed in May 2022

The official notes describe an upgrade that added further weights, expanded the glyph set and improved rendering.

FAQs

Collections with Andika

• Fonts for children and early readers

  Schoolbook sans-serifs, print handwriting and rounded display faces for worksheets, picture books and classroom materials.

• Fonts designed for legibility and accessible reading

  Families whose makers set out to make letters easier to tell apart: for low vision, beginning and struggling readers, and safety-critical displays.

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All sans serif fonts