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Oswald

A condensed gothic sans redrawn for screens, variable from ExtraLight 200 to Bold 700, with Cyrillic.

Sans Serif 6 styles · variable by Vernon Adams, Kalapi Gajjar, Cyreal OFL

Download family 165 KB Type your own text

Oswald is a condensed sans serif typeface that reworks the style of the old Alternate Gothic faces for digital screens. Vernon Adams, Kalapi Gajjar and Cyreal are credited. Oswald is a variable font with a weight axis from 200 to 700 and six named weights, without italics. It is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and suits headlines.

Oswald font preview card
Preview drawn by trendhub from the font files.
Designers
Vernon Adams, Kalapi Gajjar, Cyreal
Classification
Sans Serif
License
SIL Open Font License 1.1
Styles
6 6 weights
Variable font
Yes Weight 200–700
Glyphs
869
Languages checked
28 see the list
Last updated
version 4.103;gftools[0.9.33.dev8+g029e19f]
Used for
HeadlinesPostersBoldCondensedSocial media

Official source: Google Fonts. Facts on this page were read from the font files and the source’s published data.

Try Oswald

Sample text

Type over the sample to test your own words. The preview loads a Latin subset of Oswald; the download contains the complete files.

Oswald font specimen: alphabet, numerals and weights
Oswald specimen: alphabet, numerals and weights. Image drawn by trendhub from the font files.

Weights and styles

  • ExtraLight 200Oswald ExtraLight
  • Light 300Oswald Light
  • Regular 400Oswald Regular
  • Medium 500Oswald Medium
  • SemiBold 600Oswald SemiBold
  • Bold 700Oswald Bold

Oswald is a variable font: the download holds the whole weight range in one file, and the named weights above are positions on that range.

About Oswald

Oswald is a sans serif family with tall, narrow letters and tight spacing, as the specimen shows: capitals and lowercase are compressed sideways, and counters are slim vertical slots. The official notes describe it as a reworking of the style historically represented by the Alternate Gothic typefaces, redrawn to fit the pixel grid of ordinary screens. Vernon Adams launched it in 2011 and kept updating it until 2014, adding Light and Bold and more languages; Kalapi Gajjar updated the Latin in 2016, and Cyreal is also credited. A variable weight axis arrived in January 2019, and a July 2023 update expanded the Cyrillic set. The axis runs from 200 to 700 with six named weights, ExtraLight to Bold, and no italic. The font holds 869 glyphs covering Latin, Latin Extended, Cyrillic and Vietnamese.

Where Oswald works

News and blog headlines
Narrow letters fit long titles on one line, and the shapes were redrawn for the screen pixel grid.
Banners and thumbnails
Bold 700 packs a few words into a small graphic for video covers and social posts.
Posters with stacked type
Condensed capitals stack into tall blocks of text.
Navigation bars and tags
Medium and SemiBold in capitals make compact menu items and category labels.
Headlines in Russian or Ukrainian
The Cyrillic set, expanded in 2023, follows the same condensed proportions.

Glyphs

!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~¡¢

Latin and Latin Extended characters in the preview subset; the complete family has 869 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

SIL Open Font License 1.1Copyright 2016 The Oswald Project Authors (https://github.com/googlefonts/OswaldFont)

What the license allows

  • Use the fonts in personal and commercial work, in print, on the web and in apps.
  • Modify the fonts and build new versions from them.
  • Redistribute the fonts, on their own or bundled with software, as long as the license text and copyright notice go with them.

Conditions

  • The fonts cannot be sold by themselves.
  • A modified version must stay under the same license and cannot use a Reserved Font Name without the copyright holder's permission.
  • The authors' names cannot be used to promote a modified version without permission.

This is a short summary, not legal advice. The license text decides: read the full OFL text. A copy is included in the download.

Fonts that pair with Oswald

Open Sans Sans Serif

Oswald's condensed headlines contrast with Open Sans, a normal-width humanist sans with italics, for the text underneath.

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 Oswald 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.

CSS, self-hosted
@font-face {
  font-family: "Oswald";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Oswald-VariableFont_wght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 200 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

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

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Oswald with this markup:

HTML, Google Fonts

Things to know

No italic
Oswald is upright only.
Heaviest weight is Bold
The axis stops at 700; there is no ExtraBold or Black.
Made for short text
The narrow letters and tight spacing tire the eye in long paragraphs; use it for headings.

FAQs

Is Oswald free for commercial use?

Yes. Oswald is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which allows use in personal and commercial work, modification and redistribution. The font cannot be sold on its own, and modified versions stay under the same license.

Who designed Oswald?

Oswald was created by Vernon Adams. Kalapi Gajjar updated the Latin part in 2016, and Cyreal is also credited.

How many weights does Oswald have?

Oswald has six named weights, from ExtraLight 200 to Bold 700. It has no italics.

Is Oswald a variable font?

Yes. Oswald is a variable font with a weight axis from 200 to 700, added in January 2019.

Which languages does Oswald support?

Oswald includes the letters needed for English and other Latin-script languages such as French, Turkish, Polish and Vietnamese, as well as Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian.

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