Original Surfer

Try Original Surfer

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Original Surfer Regular

About Original Surfer

Original Surfer is a display typeface without serifs in which the strokes widen toward their ends. In the specimen the capital A is an arch with a rounded top, bowls are wide and slightly squashed, stems swell and taper like cut-paper lettering, and brackets and braces are drawn as thick crescents. The official notes say an old advertisement for the California Cliffs Caravan Park inspired the design, which aims for the mood of a summer holiday while keeping the letters clear. The family has one Regular style and is not a variable font. Its 372 glyphs cover Latin and Latin Extended, with the letters needed for languages such as Spanish, German, Polish and Turkish. The designer credit is Astigmatic; the copyright notice names Brian J. Bonislawsky, doing business as Astigmatic, and reserves the font name. Original Surfer is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Original Surfer works

Beach bar and cafe menus

Flared strokes and an arched A give section headings the look of old seaside advertising.

Travel and holiday posters

The design comes from a caravan park advertisement and suits titles for campsites, resorts and summer events.

Labels for casual products

Wide, swelling letters make a short product name on a bottle, tin or sticker stand apart from plain sans serif type.

Headings on informal websites

The letters stay clear, as the notes stress, so a heading or a navigation title remains readable.

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
• 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 Original Surfer

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 Original Surfer 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: "Original Surfer";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/OriginalSurfer-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Original Surfer", sans-serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Original Surfer 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=Original+Surfer&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

One style

Original Surfer has Regular only, with no bold and no italic.

Reserved Font Name

The copyright notice reserves the name Original Surfer, so a modified version must be released under a different name.

A display face

The swelling strokes are drawn for headings and short lines; a plain text family is needed for paragraphs.

FAQs

Similar fonts

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