Ubuntu

Try Ubuntu

Weights and styles

• Light 300Ubuntu Light Light Italic
• Regular 400Ubuntu Regular Italic
• Medium 500Ubuntu Medium Medium Italic
• Bold 700Ubuntu Bold Bold Italic

About Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a sans serif family created so that the character of the Ubuntu operating system could be seen in every menu, button and dialog. Its most recognisable trait, clear in the specimen, is the way stems on n, m, r and u bend into the curve with no spur, alongside a single-bowl g and a t with a curved foot; the result is rounded and open without being geometric. Dalton Maag did the design and implementation during 2010 and 2011 with funding from Canonical. The fonts use OpenType features and are manually hinted for desktop and mobile screens. The family has four weights, Light, Regular, Medium and Bold, with italics, eight styles in static files, and it is not a variable font. Each font holds 1,267 glyphs for Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, under the Ubuntu Font Licence 1.0.

Where Ubuntu works

Desktop and mobile interfaces

The family was drawn for menus, buttons and dialogs, and hand hinting keeps it sharp at small pixel sizes.

Software and open-source project sites

The typeface was funded on behalf of the free software community and carries an open license, which suits developer-facing pages.

Body copy with a friendly tone

Regular and Light with italics set paragraphs, and Medium adds emphasis without the jump to Bold.

Wordmarks and product names

Spurless stems give a short lowercase name a distinct outline in Medium or Bold.

Products localised into Russian and Greek

Cyrillic and Greek alphabets are part of every style, so translated screens keep the same typeface.

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
• Russian
• Ukrainian
• Bulgarian
• Greek

Writing systems with glyphs in the family besides Latin: Cyrillic, Greek. These are listed as scripts, not as a promise for every language written in them.

Character sets found in the files: cyrillic, cyrillic-ext, greek, greek-ext, latin, latin-ext. 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 Ubuntu

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 Ubuntu 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: "Ubuntu";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Ubuntu-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Ubuntu";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Ubuntu-BoldItalic.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Ubuntu";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Ubuntu-Italic.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Ubuntu";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Ubuntu-Light.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 300;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
/* …and 4 more files in the package, declared the same way */

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

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

Things to know

Four weights, top weight Bold

The weights are 300, 400, 500 and 700. There is no thin, semibold or black.

Ubuntu Font Licence 1.0

Use, modification and redistribution are permitted; notices stay in place and a substantially changed version takes a new name.

Sibling families

Ubuntu Condensed and Ubuntu Mono are published as separate families with the same design language.

FAQs

Collections with Ubuntu

• Clean sans-serif fonts for app interfaces

  Open-license sans-serif families that stay clear in buttons, menus, tables and settings screens, with the weights an interface needs.

• Humanist sans-serif fonts for readable text

  Sans-serif families with open, pen-influenced letterforms that stay comfortable in paragraphs, documents and interface text.

• Fonts that support Cyrillic

  Open-license families with Cyrillic glyphs beside Latin: text sans and serifs, a monospace, scripts and display faces.

Similar fonts

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