Montserrat Alternates

Try Montserrat Alternates

Weights and styles

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

About Montserrat Alternates

Montserrat Alternates is a geometric sans serif that shares its skeleton with Montserrat but replaces many letters with special forms. The specimen makes the differences plain: the capital A has a rounded arch for a top, the E is a looped curve, M and W are built from arches, Q has a vertical tail, Y borrows the shape of a lowercase y, and both Z and z carry a crossbar; in the lowercase, a is single-storey and l and t end in curved feet. The project grew out of Julieta Ulanovsky's wish to preserve the sign lettering of the Montserrat neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. The family has nine weights, Thin to Black, each with an italic, as 18 static files with 1,447 glyphs across Latin, Cyrillic and Vietnamese. It was redrawn by Jacques Le Bailly in 2017. The license is the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Montserrat Alternates works

Logos that need a twist

The arched A, looped E and crossbarred Z make a wordmark distinct while keeping a plain geometric base.

Headlines beside Montserrat text

Because the skeleton is shared, a heading in Alternates sits naturally over text in the regular family.

Shopfront and cafe graphics

The special forms echo the urban sign lettering the Montserrat project set out to preserve.

Cosmetics and fashion labels

Thin and ExtraLight show the arched capitals as fine lines on packaging and tags.

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
• 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, 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 Montserrat Alternates

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 Montserrat Alternates 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: "Montserrat Alternates";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/MontserratAlternates-Black.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 900;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Montserrat Alternates";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/MontserratAlternates-BlackItalic.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 900;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Montserrat Alternates";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/MontserratAlternates-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Montserrat Alternates";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/MontserratAlternates-BoldItalic.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
/* …and 14 more files in the package, declared the same way */

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

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Montserrat Alternates 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=Montserrat+Alternates:ital,wght@0,100;0,200;0,300;0,400;0,500;0,600;0,700;0,800;0,900;1,100;1,200;1,300;1,400;1,500;1,600;1,700;1,800;1,900&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Static files only

The package holds 18 separate fonts. Unlike Montserrat, this family is not a variable font here.

Lightest files report unusual weight values

The Thin and ExtraLight files are labelled 250 and 275 internally, so they appear under those numbers in the specimen.

Alternates are the default forms

The special letters are not an optional feature; typing ordinary text produces them.

FAQs

Collections with Montserrat Alternates

• Fonts for logos and wordmarks

  Geometric, rounded, wide and classical open-license typefaces with enough character to carry a name on their own.

Similar fonts

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