Fraunces

Try Fraunces

Weights and styles

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

Fraunces 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 Fraunces

Fraunces is an Old Style soft-serif typeface whose official notes trace its manner to typefaces of the early 20th century. In the specimen the heavy weights show swollen, rounded serifs, ball-shaped terminals on a, c, f and r, and a slight lean in letters such as h, n and m, while the light weights turn thin and sharply contrasted. The variable fonts carry four axes: weight from 100 to 900, optical size from 9 to 144, Softness from 0 to 100, which governs how inky the shapes look, and Wonky, a switch that swaps the leaning letterforms in and out. Roman and italic each have nine named weights, 18 styles in total, across 683 glyphs covering Latin, Latin Extended and Vietnamese. Phaedra Charles and Flavia Zimbardi, the two partners behind Undercase Type, designed Fraunces under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Fraunces works

Magazine and blog headlines

The optical size axis reaches 144, so large titles can use the finer, higher-contrast drawing intended for display sizes.

Food and drink packaging

Raising Softness towards 100 rounds the serifs and joins, which gives labels set in the heavy weights an inked, printed look.

Brand wordmarks

The Wonky axis swaps the leaning h, n and m for upright forms, so one name can be set in a quirky or a calmer voice.

Pull quotes and intros

Nine italic weights with ball terminals set a quotation apart from the roman text around it.

Posters

Black 900, with its swollen serifs and tight counters, holds a short line at poster size.

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 Fraunces

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 Fraunces 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: "Fraunces";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Fraunces-Italic-VariableFont_SOFT%2CWONK%2Copsz%2Cwght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 100 900;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Fraunces";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Fraunces-VariableFont_SOFT%2CWONK%2Copsz%2Cwght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 100 900;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

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

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Fraunces 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=Fraunces:ital,wght@0,100..900;1,100..900&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

The weight axis defaults to 900

Opening the variable file without choosing a weight shows Black, as in the specimen heading; set the weight explicitly for text.

Wonky is on by default

The Wonky axis has two positions, 0 and 1, and its default is 1. Set it to 0 for the upright forms of the affected letters.

Two variable files

The download holds one variable file for the roman and one for the italic, each with all four axes.

No Cyrillic or Greek

The character sets are Latin, Latin Extended and Vietnamese only.

FAQs

Collections with Fraunces

• Fonts for packaging and product labels

  Brush scripts, soft serifs and sturdy display faces for jars, boxes, bottles and tags, where a name has to work on a small curved surface.

• Variable fonts with an optical size axis

  Variable families that redraw themselves for the size they are set at: sturdier and looser when small, finer and tighter when large.

• Variable fonts with unusual axes

  Experimental and expressive variable fonts with custom axes: softness, bounce, casualness, morphing, rotation, grade and more.

Similar fonts

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