Mate

Try Mate

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Mate Regular Italic

About Mate

Mate is a serif typeface of simple structure with sharp, open counters, intended first for text. In the specimen the strokes have moderate contrast, the serifs are short and slightly wedge-shaped, and the figures vary in height, with 3, 4, 5, 7 and 9 dropping below the baseline. The italic, according to the official notes, uses shapes that are unusual for an italic and keeps traces of calligraphy that change the rhythm of a line. The family has one weight in two styles, Regular and Italic, and is not a variable font; the notes also mention a small caps style, which is not part of this package. Its 431 glyphs cover Latin and Latin Extended, and a February 2023 update enlarged the glyph set and added fractions. Eduardo Tunni is the designer. Mate is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Mate works

Long-form reading

The notes name text as the primary use, and the open counters keep lines of Regular even in essays and book pages.

Text with dates and numbers

Old-style figures that rise and dip like lowercase letters blend into a sentence instead of standing out as capitals would.

Emphasis and quotations

The calligraphic italic sets titles, foreign words and quoted lines apart from the Regular.

Display titles

According to the notes, the construction details of the letters hold up at larger sizes, so the same face can set a chapter title.

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

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 Mate

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

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

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

Things to know

No bold

Mate has a single weight. Regular and Italic are the only styles.

Small caps are a separate matter

The official notes describe a small caps style, but the files here are Regular and Italic only.

Old-style figures

In the specimen the numerals are of varying height, not lining figures of capital height.

The name Mate is reserved

The copyright notice lists Mate as a Reserved Font Name, so modified versions need another name.

FAQs

Similar fonts

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