BenchNine

Try BenchNine

Weights and styles

• Light 300BenchNine Light
• Regular 400BenchNine Regular
• Bold 700BenchNine Bold

About BenchNine

BenchNine is a condensed sans serif whose narrow, upright letters pack long words into little width. Stroke ends and corners are softened rather than cut sharp. The official description connects this to the way ink spreads and bleeds in traditional woodcut printing, and says the drawing blends several old foundry designs and rounds their corners slightly. Verticals dominate: round letters such as O and C are drawn as tall ovals with nearly straight sides, and the ampersand takes an unusual open form. The family has three weights, Light, Regular and Bold, without italics, and is not a variable font. Each font holds 422 glyphs covering the Latin and Latin Extended sets. Vernon Adams drew BenchNine with headlines in mind, for titles that should look a little different from the usual, and it is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where BenchNine works

Long headlines in narrow columns

Condensed letters fit a full headline across a phone screen or one newspaper column.

Poster titles with small print

Bold 700 sets tall, dark titles while Light 300 handles the dates and credits beneath.

Table headers and chart labels

Narrow capitals and figures keep column heads and axis labels short.

Navigation bars and tabs

Several menu items fit side by side because each word takes little horizontal room.

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
• Turkish
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Romanian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Estonian

Character sets found in the files: latin, latin-ext. 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 BenchNine

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 BenchNine 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: "BenchNine";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/BenchNine-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "BenchNine";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/BenchNine-Light.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 300;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "BenchNine";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/BenchNine-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

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

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves BenchNine 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=BenchNine:wght@300;400;700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

No italics

BenchNine has three upright fonts only. Emphasis comes from switching weight.

A gap between Regular and Bold

The weights are 300, 400 and 700. There is no Medium or SemiBold step.

Latin scripts only

The character sets are Latin and Latin Extended; no other writing system is included.

FAQs

Collections with BenchNine

• Condensed fonts for headlines

  Narrow sans-serif and serif display fonts that set tall, compact headlines in limited width, from hairline to heavy.

Similar fonts

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