Arvo

Try Arvo

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Arvo Regular Italic
• Bold 700Arvo Bold Bold Italic

About Arvo

Arvo is a slab serif of geometric construction, drawn by Anton Koovit as a small family intended for the screen as well as for print. The specimen shows strokes of nearly even thickness, bowls drawn close to circles and flat rectangular serifs about as heavy as the stems; the capital A carries a slab across its apex. The official notes describe the design as close to monolinear with a small amount of contrast. The family has four cuts: Regular and Bold, each with an italic. Its 224 glyphs cover the Latin subset only. The notes explain the name as an Estonian first name for men that is also a Finnish word for number, value or worth, a meaning they connect to the amount of programming that hinting requires. The files offered here carry version 1.006.

Where Arvo works

Headlines and subheads

The block serifs and round, geometric bowls hold their shape at large sizes, and Bold 700 gives a clearly heavier step above Regular for titles.

Short articles and blog text

The notes present Arvo as suited to screens, and the low contrast keeps thin strokes from breaking up in paragraphs at reading sizes.

Printed flyers and brochures

The family is described as working in print too, so the same four styles can carry a leaflet and the web page that goes with it.

Emphasis within running text

Each weight has its own drawn italic, so a quotation or a title of a work can be marked without leaving the family.

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
• Slovenian
• Estonian

Rarely used letters that are not in the font: French œ, Œ.

Character sets found in the files: latin. 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 Arvo

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

body {
  font-family: "Arvo", serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Arvo 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=Arvo:ital,wght@0,400;0,700;1,400;1,700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Two weights only

Arvo comes in Regular 400 and Bold 700 with matching italics. It has no light, medium or black cut and is not a variable font.

Latin subset only in these files

The notes mention a later 2.0.1 release that added Cyrillic, but the files here are version 1.006 and contain 224 glyphs in the Latin subset, with no Cyrillic or Greek.

French ligature œ is absent

The letters needed for French are present except for the rare œ; languages that need Latin Extended letters, such as Polish or Turkish, are not covered.

FAQs

Collections with Arvo

• Slab serif fonts

  Slab-serif families with block-like serifs, from geometric and typewriter-flavored designs to sturdy text faces with italics.

Similar fonts

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