Open Sans

Try Open Sans

Weights and styles

• Light 300Open Sans Light Light Italic
• Regular 400Open Sans Regular Italic
• Medium 500Open Sans Medium Medium Italic
• SemiBold 600Open Sans SemiBold SemiBold Italic
• Bold 700Open Sans Bold Bold Italic
• ExtraBold 800Open Sans ExtraBold ExtraBold Italic

Open Sans 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 Open Sans

Open Sans is a humanist sans serif whose letters have wide openings, an upright axis and a neutral but approachable tone. The specimen shows a tall lowercase, a two-storey a and g, and generous space inside the letters. Steve Matteson designed it, and the official notes say it was tuned for print, web and mobile interfaces. In March 2021 the family was rebuilt as a variable font and gained Hebrew. It now has two axes: weight from 300 to 800 and width from 75 to 100. Six named weights, Light to ExtraBold, each have an italic, which makes 12 styles. The files contain 1,152 glyphs with subsets for Latin Extended, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and Vietnamese. The same 2021 update placed the family under the SIL Open Font License. Open Sans was added to Google Fonts in 2011.

Where Open Sans works

Website body text

Open apertures and a tall lowercase were drawn for legibility on web and mobile screens.

Forms and settings screens

Regular, Medium and SemiBold separate labels, values and section titles without changing family.

Printed reports

The design was tuned for print as well as screens, with italics for citations and emphasis.

Hebrew and Latin side by side

The Hebrew subset added in 2021 lets bilingual pages use one typeface.

Compact navigation

Reducing width towards 75 fits menu items and table headers into less 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
• Russian
• Ukrainian
• Bulgarian
• Greek

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

Character sets found in the files: cyrillic, cyrillic-ext, greek, hebrew, 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 Open Sans

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 Open Sans 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: "Open Sans";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/OpenSans-Italic-VariableFont_wdth%2Cwght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 300 800;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Open Sans";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/OpenSans-VariableFont_wdth%2Cwght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 300 800;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Open Sans 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=Open+Sans:ital,wght@0,300..800;1,300..800&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Weights run from 300 to 800

There is no Thin or Black; the lightest named weight is Light and the heaviest ExtraBold.

Width only narrows

The width axis goes from 75 to 100.

Hebrew arrived in 2021

Older copies of the family from before the variable update do not contain Hebrew.

FAQs

Collections with Open Sans

• Fonts for résumés and CVs

  Readable open-license serif and sans-serif families for a one- or two-page CV, with the weights and italics a document needs.

• Fonts for subtitles and video captions

  Plain, sturdy sans-serif families for subtitles and captions, chosen for clear letters at small sizes and, in most cases, wide language coverage.

• Humanist sans-serif fonts for readable text

  Sans-serif families with open, pen-influenced letterforms that stay comfortable in paragraphs, documents and interface text.

• Variable fonts with a width axis

  Variable families in which letter width is adjustable as well as weight, from slight narrowing for copy-fitting to a full condensed-to-wide range.

Similar fonts

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