Smythe

Try Smythe

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Smythe Regular

About Smythe

Smythe is a narrow display face with small flared serifs and a period flavour. In the specimen the letters are tall and tightly proportioned, the lowercase y and g finish in curled descenders, the K and L extend a leg along the baseline, the Q has a wavy tail, and the ampersand is drawn as a joined E and t. The zero carries a short horizontal bar at its centre. The official description calls Smythe a reworking and mixing of various typefaces of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which it sums up as Arts and Crafts or Art Deco. The family is one Regular file with 269 glyphs and is not a variable font. Besides Western European Latin it includes the Turkish letters. Vernon Adams is the designer, and the license is the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Smythe works

Theatre and exhibition posters

Narrow letters fit a long title on one line, and the curled descenders supply period detail.

Book covers and chapter openers

The Arts and Crafts and Art Deco sources suit titles set in the decades around 1900.

Labels with a vintage tone

The joined E and t of the ampersand and the wavy Q tail add ornament to a two-word product name.

Headlines in narrow columns

The condensed proportions hold more characters per line than a normal-width face at the same size.

Turkish titles

The letters ğ, ş, ı and İ are present, so Turkish headings can be set.

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
• 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 Smythe

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

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

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

Things to know

One weight

Smythe has Regular 400 only, with no bold or italic.

An unusual ampersand

The & is drawn as a joined E and t, which some readers may not recognise at once.

Limited Latin Extended

Turkish is covered, but Polish ą and ę, Czech č and Hungarian ő are not in the font.

FAQs

Similar fonts

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