Catamaran

Try Catamaran

Weights and styles

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

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

About Catamaran

Catamaran is a sans serif family that covers the Latin and Tamil scripts. According to the official notes, its Tamil letters are monolinear and were developed together with Palanquin, a related Latin and Devanagari family. In the specimen the Latin has fairly narrow proportions, open apertures, a single-storey g and stroke ends cut at a slight angle; the Thin is a hairline, while the Black turns compact and dark. The family is a variable font with one axis, weight, running from 100 to 900 across nine named steps, and it has no italic. The single file holds 462 glyphs with Latin, extended Latin and Tamil subsets. Pria Ravichandran, an Indian type designer, leads the project; the name refers to the twin-hulled boat long used in South India. Catamaran is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Catamaran works

Tamil and English side by side

Both scripts were drawn as one family, so bilingual pages keep the same stroke weight and rhythm across languages.

App and web interfaces

Narrow letters fit more characters into buttons and menus, and the weight axis separates labels from values.

Text with a full heading hierarchy

Nine weights from 100 to 900 give captions, body copy, subheads and titles without a second family.

Posters built on weight contrast

Setting Thin beside Black produces a strong contrast from one file.

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

Writing systems with glyphs in the family besides Latin: Tamil. These are listed as scripts, not as a promise for every language written in them.

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

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 Catamaran 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: "Catamaran";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Catamaran-VariableFont_wght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 100 900;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

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

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Catamaran 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=Catamaran:wght@100..900&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

No italic

Catamaran has upright styles only; emphasis has to come from a change of weight.

Tamil yes, Cyrillic and Greek no

The subsets are Latin, extended Latin and Tamil. Vietnamese, Cyrillic and Greek are not included.

One variable file

The whole 100 to 900 range is delivered in a single TTF.

FAQs

Similar fonts

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