Barlow

Try Barlow

Weights and styles

• Thin 100Barlow Thin Thin Italic
• ExtraLight 200Barlow ExtraLight ExtraLight Italic
• Light 300Barlow Light Light Italic
• Regular 400Barlow Regular Italic
• Medium 500Barlow Medium Medium Italic
• SemiBold 600Barlow SemiBold SemiBold Italic
• Bold 700Barlow Bold Bold Italic
• ExtraBold 800Barlow ExtraBold ExtraBold Italic
• Black 900Barlow Black Black Italic

About Barlow

Barlow is a grotesk sans serif whose strokes are close to uniform and whose ends are softened by a small radius. Its designer, Jeremy Tribby, who leads the project, took its character from the visual language of California's public realm: the state's vehicle plates, highway signage, buses and trains. In the specimen the capitals are fairly narrow and straight-sided, the lowercase is tall, and the figures are simple and open. Barlow is the normal width of a superfamily that also includes Barlow Semi Condensed and Barlow Condensed. It has nine weights from Thin to Black, each with an italic, 18 styles in static files, and it is not a variable font. Each font has 680 glyphs for Latin, Latin Extended and Vietnamese; Vietnamese was added in December 2018. The license is the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Barlow works

Product interfaces

Even strokes and a tall lowercase keep Regular and Medium clear in buttons, lists and settings screens.

Wayfinding and transport information

The design is modelled on highway signs and vehicle plates, lettering made for reading at a glance.

Brand systems with three widths

Barlow, Barlow Semi Condensed and Barlow Condensed share nine weights, so a brand can cover text, labels and headlines with one design.

Website body text

Regular with its italic sets paragraphs, and SemiBold or Bold marks headings without a second family.

Presentations and reports

Thin and ExtraLight work for large numbers and titles, while Black anchors a cover slide.

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

Character sets found in the files: 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 Barlow

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 Barlow 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: "Barlow";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Barlow-Black.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 900;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Barlow";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Barlow-BlackItalic.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 900;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Barlow";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Barlow-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Barlow";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Barlow-BoldItalic.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
/* …and 14 more files in the package, declared the same way */

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

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Barlow 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=Barlow:ital,wght@0,100;0,200;0,300;0,400;0,500;0,600;0,700;0,800;0,900;1,100;1,200;1,300;1,400;1,500;1,600;1,700;1,800;1,900&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Static files, no variable font

The download has 18 files, one for each weight and italic.

Normal width of a superfamily

The narrower Barlow Semi Condensed and Barlow Condensed are separate families.

No Cyrillic or Greek

The 680 glyphs cover Latin, Latin Extended and Vietnamese.

FAQs

Collections with Barlow

• Fonts for presentations and slides

  Sans-serif and slab-serif families that stay readable on a projector or a shared screen, with strong bolds for slide titles.

• Fonts for signage and wayfinding

  Sans-serif families developed for signs, road lettering and information displays, readable at a distance and at an angle.

Similar fonts

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