Darker Grotesque

Try Darker Grotesque

Weights and styles

• Light 300Darker Grotesque Light
• Regular 400Darker Grotesque Regular
• Medium 500Darker Grotesque Medium
• SemiBold 600Darker Grotesque SemiBold
• Bold 700Darker Grotesque Bold
• ExtraBold 800Darker Grotesque ExtraBold
• Black 900Darker Grotesque Black

Darker Grotesque 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 Darker Grotesque

Darker Grotesque is a sans serif in the grotesque tradition, presented in the official notes as an original Vietnamese typeface that takes its cues from post-modern and brutalist trends in typography. In the specimen the lowercase is small beside the capitals, the a is a single-storey form, round letters are close to circles and the lighter weights are drawn with very thin strokes, so the design reads as fine and open at Light and compact and dark at Black. The family is a variable font with one axis, weight, from 300 to 900, and seven named weights: Light, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold, ExtraBold and Black. Its 575 glyphs cover Latin, Latin Extended and Vietnamese. The notes add that a 2023 upgrade fixed issues and made the font variable. Gabriel Lam and ViệtAnh Nguyễn are the credited designers. Darker Grotesque is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Darker Grotesque works

Brand identities

A single-storey a and near-circular bowls give a wordmark a recognisable shape, and seven weights cover the rest of the system.

Editorial headlines

Light 300 set large gives a fine, airy title; Black 900 gives a dense one from the same family.

Vietnamese-language design

The family was drawn in Vietnam and its 575 glyphs include the Vietnamese character set.

Portfolio and gallery sites

Thin strokes and a small lowercase suit sparse layouts with large type and plenty of white space.

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 Darker Grotesque

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 Darker Grotesque 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: "Darker Grotesque";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/DarkerGrotesque-VariableFont_wght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 300 900;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

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

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Darker Grotesque 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=Darker+Grotesque:wght@300..900&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Upright styles only

The official notes mention italic versions, but the files here contain the seven upright weights and no italic.

Small lowercase

Lowercase letters are low in relation to the capitals, so text looks smaller than the nominal size suggests.

One variable file

The download is a single variable font for weights 300 to 900. Static files are available from the official source.

FAQs

Similar fonts

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