Istok Web

Try Istok Web

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Istok Web Regular Italic
• Bold 700Istok Web Bold Bold Italic

About Istok Web

Istok Web is a sans serif typeface with humanist proportions: strokes change slightly in thickness, stroke ends are softened rather than cut sharp, and the lowercase is open and fairly wide. Andrey V. Panov has developed it since 2008. Some early letters started from modified METAFONT sources of a TeX font family, but the design has since moved far away from that origin, and the outlines were drawn in FontForge. Most glyphs carry manual TrueType hinting aimed at LCD screens, with automatic hinting on rarer symbols. The word Web in the name marks a version with modified vertical metrics. The family has four styles, Regular and Bold, each with an italic, as static files. Its 1,379 glyphs cover Latin, Latin Extended, Cyrillic and Extended Cyrillic. Istok Web was added to Google Fonts in 2011, and the files are version 1.0.2g from June 2014.

Where Istok Web works

Russian-language websites

The Cyrillic set covers Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian in the same Regular, Bold and italic styles as the Latin.

Text on ordinary LCD monitors

Most glyphs were hinted by hand for LCD rendering, which matters at small sizes on standard-resolution displays.

Bilingual Latin and Cyrillic documents

Both scripts live in one font, so mixed English and Russian paragraphs keep an even colour.

Simple text hierarchies

Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic give the four classic styles for body, emphasis and subheads.

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
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Estonian
• Russian
• Ukrainian
• Bulgarian

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

Character sets found in the files: cyrillic, cyrillic-ext, 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 Istok Web

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

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

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

Things to know

Two weights only

Istok Web has Regular 400 and Bold 700. There are no light, medium or heavy cuts.

Some Latin languages are incomplete

The letters needed for Turkish, Romanian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Vietnamese are not all present, and Greek is not included.

Not a variable font

The family ships as four static files.

FAQs

Similar fonts

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