Overpass

Try Overpass

Weights and styles

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

Overpass 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 Overpass

Overpass is a sans serif family that starts from Highway Gothic, the letterforms in the Standard Alphabets for Traffic Control Devices issued by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration. The designers adjusted those sign shapes so they would hold up at small sizes on screens and, later, at display sizes in the lighter weights. The specimen shows traces of the source: slanted cuts where some strokes end, as on the descender of p, wide openings and plain, slightly narrow capitals. Overpass is a variable font with a weight axis from 100 to 900. Nine named weights from Thin to Black come in roman and italic, 18 styles in all. The fonts hold 1,332 glyphs covering Latin, Latin Extended, Cyrillic and Vietnamese. Delve Withrington, Dave Bailey and Thomas Jockin are the credited designers, and a monospaced companion exists as a separate family.

Where Overpass works

Wayfinding and signage

The letterforms descend from road sign alphabets designed to be read quickly at a distance.

Software interfaces

The sign shapes were reworked for small on-screen sizes, and nine weights with italics cover a full UI hierarchy.

Documentation and long text

Regular with a true italic handles extended passages in print and online.

Posters and environmental graphics

Thin through Light were tuned for display sizes; Black gives heavy headlines.

Interfaces in Cyrillic

Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian letters are part of the same family.

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 Overpass

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 Overpass 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: "Overpass";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Overpass-Italic-VariableFont_wght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 100 900;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Overpass";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Overpass-VariableFont_wght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 100 900;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

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

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Overpass 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=Overpass:ital,wght@0,100..900;1,100..900&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

One axis

Overpass varies in weight only, from 100 to 900.

The monospaced version is separate

Overpass Mono is a different family and is not in this package.

No Greek

Latin, Cyrillic and Vietnamese are covered; Greek is not.

FAQs

Collections with Overpass

• 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.

• Fonts for signage and wayfinding

  Sans-serif families developed for signs, road lettering and information displays, readable at a distance and at an angle.

Similar fonts

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