Barlow Condensed

Try Barlow Condensed

Weights and styles

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

About Barlow Condensed

Barlow Condensed is a narrow, low-contrast grotesk sans serif, the tightest of the three widths in the Barlow superfamily; the other two are Barlow and Barlow Semi Condensed. The design draws on the public lettering of California: number plates, road signs, buses and trains. In the specimen the round letters have straight vertical sides, so O, C and D stand like upright capsules, the stroke ends are faintly rounded, and the alphabet takes far less width than a normal sans at the same height. There are nine weights from Thin to Black, each with an italic, 18 styles supplied as static files; the family is not a variable font. Each font has 680 glyphs for Latin, Latin Extended and Vietnamese, the last added in December 2018. Jeremy Tribby leads the project, and the fonts are published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Barlow Condensed works

Poster and banner headlines

Tall, narrow capitals let a long line run large across a fixed width, and Black 900 gives it mass.

Dense tables and dashboards

Condensed figures and labels fit more columns on screen before a table has to scroll.

Signage and wayfinding

The letterforms come from highway signs and vehicle plates, which were made to be read quickly.

Navigation labels on small screens

Medium and SemiBold keep menu items on one line in tab bars and side menus.

Headlines over Barlow text

The three Barlow widths share their weights, so a condensed headline matches normal-width paragraphs.

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 Condensed

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 Condensed 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 Condensed";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/BarlowCondensed-Black.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 900;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Barlow Condensed";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/BarlowCondensed-BlackItalic.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 900;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Barlow Condensed";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/BarlowCondensed-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Barlow Condensed";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/BarlowCondensed-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 Condensed", sans-serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Barlow Condensed 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+Condensed: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

Eighteen static files

Each weight and italic is a separate file. The package has no variable font.

One of three widths

Barlow and Barlow Semi Condensed are published as separate families with the same nine weights.

Vietnamese added in 2018

The official notes record that Vietnamese support came with an update in December 2018.

FAQs

Collections with Barlow Condensed

• 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