Recursive

Try Recursive

Weights and styles

• Light 300Recursive Light
• Regular 400Recursive Regular
• Medium 500Recursive Medium
• SemiBold 600Recursive SemiBold
• Bold 700Recursive Bold
• ExtraBold 800Recursive ExtraBold
• Black 900Recursive Black
• ExtraBlack 1000Recursive ExtraBlack

Recursive is a variable font: the download holds the whole weight range in one file, and the named weights above are positions on that range. There is no separate italic file: slanted styles are set with the Slant axis.

About Recursive

Recursive is a variable family that its makers call a typographic palette for interfaces and code. The starting point is single-stroke casual, a brush lettering style from sign painting, which the Casual axis blends into an otherwise linear sans. A Monospace axis moves the same letters between proportional and fixed widths, Weight runs from Light 300 to ExtraBlack 1000, Slant tilts the letters by up to 15 degrees, and a Cursive axis runs from 0 to 1. In the specimen the zero is slashed, the dot of the i is square and braces are large. All of this is one file of 1,283 glyphs with 64 named instances across Latin, Latin Extended and Vietnamese; the catalogue counts 16 styles from eight weights, upright and slanted. Arrow Type, a foundry in Brooklyn, leads the project under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Recursive works

Code editors

Setting the Monospace axis to 1 gives fixed-width letters with a slashed zero; the Casual axis changes the tone without changing the grid.

Interfaces that mix text and code

Proportional and monospaced text come from the same file and share weights, so inline code matches the label beside it.

Technical documentation

The Slant axis gives slanted styles for emphasis and comments, and weights up to ExtraBlack 1000 cover headings.

Dashboards with dense data

The family was designed for data-rich screens: fixed-width figures align in columns while labels stay proportional.

Animated or responsive type

Five axes in one variable font let a design interpolate between linear and casual or light and heavy without swapping files.

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

Character sets found in the files: 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 Recursive

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 Recursive 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: "Recursive";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Recursive-VariableFont_CASL%2CCRSV%2CMONO%2Cslnt%2Cwght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 300 1000;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

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

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Recursive 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=Recursive:wght@300..1000&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

One large variable file

The package is a single variable font of about 2.3 MB; static cuts are not included. For the web, limit the axes you request or subset the file.

Italics come from axes

There is no separate italic file. Slant runs from 0 to −15, and Cursive runs from 0 to 1 with a default of 0.5; slanted styles are made by setting these axes.

Weight goes to 1000

The weight axis starts at 300 and ends at 1000, one step past the usual 900, with ExtraBlack as the heaviest named weight.

Custom axes need CSS

Monospace and Casual are addressed as MONO and CASL through font-variation-settings; they are not standard CSS properties.

FAQs

Collections with Recursive

• Variable fonts with unusual axes

  Experimental and expressive variable fonts with custom axes: softness, bounce, casualness, morphing, rotation, grade and more.

Similar fonts

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