Spectral

Try Spectral

Weights and styles

• ExtraLight 200Spectral ExtraLight ExtraLight Italic
• Light 300Spectral Light Light Italic
• Regular 400Spectral Regular Italic
• Medium 500Spectral Medium Medium Italic
• SemiBold 600Spectral SemiBold SemiBold Italic
• Bold 700Spectral Bold Bold Italic
• ExtraBold 800Spectral ExtraBold ExtraBold Italic

About Spectral

Spectral is a serif family made by Production Type on commission from Google Fonts, with text-heavy, screen-first settings and long reading as its main purpose. In the specimen the letters have clear thick and thin strokes, sharp bracketed serifs, a small-eyed e and a compact lowercase with tall ascenders; the capitals are wide and the quotation marks are wedge-shaped. The family has seven weights, ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold and ExtraBold, each in roman and italic, 14 styles supplied as static files; it is not a variable font. Each font holds 1,446 glyphs for Latin, Latin Extended, Vietnamese and Cyrillic, and the official description mentions small caps. The font's name table names Jean-Baptiste Levee as designer and Production Type as manufacturer. The license is the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Spectral works

Long articles and essays

The family is aimed at long-form reading on screens, with Regular and Italic for the text.

Book-style documents

Small caps, seven weights and true italics supply the pieces of traditional book typography in reports and e-books.

Elegant headlines

ExtraLight and Light show the sharp serifs and stroke contrast at large sizes for titles and openers.

Russian and Ukrainian publications

Cyrillic and extended Cyrillic character sets let the same serif set Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian text.

Editorial brand systems

Weights up to ExtraBold provide emphasis, section labels and quotes without a second serif.

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 Spectral

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 Spectral 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: "Spectral";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Spectral-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Spectral";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Spectral-BoldItalic.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Spectral";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Spectral-ExtraBold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 800;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Spectral";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Spectral-ExtraBoldItalic.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 800;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
/* …and 10 more files in the package, declared the same way */

body {
  font-family: "Spectral", serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Spectral 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=Spectral:ital,wght@0,200;0,300;0,400;0,500;0,600;0,700;0,800;1,200;1,300;1,400;1,500;1,600;1,700;1,800&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Static files, not variable

Spectral ships as 14 separate TTF files, one per weight and italic.

No Thin or Black

The range runs from ExtraLight 200 to ExtraBold 800.

Small caps included

The official description lists small caps; they are reached through OpenType features in software that supports them.

FAQs

Collections with Spectral

• Serif fonts for long reading on screens

  Text serifs drawn for screens or for long reading: large x-heights, moderate contrast and real italics for articles, blogs and documentation.

Similar fonts

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