Silkscreen

Try Silkscreen

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Silkscreen Regular
• Bold 700Silkscreen Bold

About Silkscreen

Silkscreen is a bitmap-style display typeface in which every letter is assembled from square pixels. The specimen shows capitals only: the lowercase row repeats the uppercase shapes, so text always sets in block capitals of one height. Curves are stepped, diagonals become staircases, and the letters are spaced well apart, which keeps each shape distinct on a coarse grid. Jason Kottke designed the face for type at small sizes in web graphics, and the official notes date its first release to 1999. The family has Regular and Bold, two styles in all, and is not a variable font. Its 227 glyphs cover the basic Latin set with numerals and punctuation; the letters needed for English, French, German, Spanish and other Western European languages are present. The fonts are published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Silkscreen works

Retro game interfaces

Stepped pixel outlines match score counters, menus and title screens in games styled after early computer graphics.

Small labels in web graphics

The face was drawn for small sizes, so tags, badges and tiny captions inside banners keep each letter distinct.

Poster and cover titles

Set large, the square blocks become a visible pattern, and a short title turns into the graphic itself.

Counters and status lines

Bold next to Regular separates a label from its value in a timer, price tag or status bar without a change of size.

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
• Estonian

Character sets found in the files: latin. 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 Silkscreen

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 Silkscreen 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: "Silkscreen";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Silkscreen-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Silkscreen";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Silkscreen-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

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

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Silkscreen 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=Silkscreen:wght@400;700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Capitals only

Lowercase input is drawn as capitals, so mixed-case text cannot be set in Silkscreen.

Regular and Bold, no italic

Regular 400 and Bold 700 make up the whole family. There is no italic.

Basic Latin coverage

The 227 glyphs belong to the Latin subset. The Latin Extended set is incomplete, so text in Central European languages should be tested first.

FAQs

Similar fonts

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