Cantarell

Try Cantarell

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Cantarell Regular Italic
• Bold 700Cantarell Bold Bold Italic

About Cantarell

Cantarell is a contemporary humanist sans serif developed for reading on screen; its designer, Dave Crossland, had a particular target in mind, web pages viewed on an HTC Dream phone. He drew it in 2009 while studying typeface design at the University of Reading, using only open-source software, chiefly FontForge. In the specimen the letters are wide and loosely spaced, with open shapes in a, c, e and s and strokes that vary little in thickness. The family has two weights, Regular 400 and Bold 700, each with an italic, and is not a variable font. Metadata fixes in October 2022 renamed the former Oblique style to Italic. Each font has 391 glyphs covering Latin and Latin Extended. The license is the SIL Open Font License 1.1, and the project notes invite users to extend the fonts with glyphs their own writing systems need.

Where Cantarell works

Interface text

Wide, open letters with generous spacing stay distinct in menus, dialogs and settings lists.

Web pages read on phones

The family was developed with a small mobile screen as its test case.

Simple documents

Regular and Bold with their italics cover text, headings and emphasis in notes, manuals and readme-style pages.

Open-source projects that extend their fonts

The designer explicitly invites users to add missing glyphs under the Open Font License, and the family was built with open tools.

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
• 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 Cantarell

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

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

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

Things to know

Two weights

Cantarell has Regular 400 and Bold 700 only, each with an italic.

Oblique became Italic

Since the October 2022 metadata update the slanted styles are named Italic instead of Oblique.

Romanian is incomplete

Latin and Latin Extended are covered, but not all letters for Romanian are present.

FAQs

Collections with Cantarell

• Humanist sans-serif fonts for readable text

  Sans-serif families with open, pen-influenced letterforms that stay comfortable in paragraphs, documents and interface text.

Similar fonts

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