Besley

Try Besley

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Besley Regular Italic
• Medium 500Besley Medium Medium Italic
• SemiBold 600Besley SemiBold SemiBold Italic
• Bold 700Besley Bold Bold Italic
• ExtraBold 800Besley ExtraBold ExtraBold Italic
• Black 900Besley Black Black Italic

Besley is a variable font: the download holds the whole weight range in one file per style, and the named weights above are positions on that range.

About Besley

Besley is a slab serif of the antique kind, with sturdy bracketed serifs, ball terminals on letters such as a, c, r and y, and moderate contrast between thick and thin strokes. The official description says it was inspired by a slab serif design of Robert Besley and points to a slight rounding of the corners, added for warmth, along with ligatures and contextual substitutions among the OpenType features. The download contains two variable files, roman and italic, with a weight axis from 400 to 900. Six named weights are defined: Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold, ExtraBold and Black, 12 styles with the italics, and the family has nothing lighter than Regular. The 457 glyphs cover the Latin and Latin Extended character sets. Owen Earl designed Besley for indestructible type*, and the fonts are published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Besley works

Newspaper-style headlines

Bold to Black give heavy slab headlines, and the rounded corners soften them at large sizes.

Editorial text with emphasis

Regular and Medium have matching italics, so articles can use one family for text, emphasis and titles.

Posters and covers

Black 900 with its thick slabs and ball terminals fills a title line with dark, even colour.

Labels and packaging

Sturdy serifs survive small print on a label, and six weights rank a product name above its description.

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

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 Besley

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 Besley 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: "Besley";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Besley-Italic-VariableFont_wght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400 900;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Besley";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Besley-VariableFont_wght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400 900;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

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

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Besley 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=Besley:ital,wght@0,400..900;1,400..900&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

No light weights

The weight axis runs from 400 to 900. Regular is the lightest style.

Italics at every weight

Each of the six weights has an italic, supplied in a separate variable file.

Latin scripts only

The 457 glyphs cover Latin and Latin Extended. Cyrillic and Greek are not included.

FAQs

Similar fonts

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