Vesper Libre

Try Vesper Libre

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Vesper Libre Regular
• Medium 500Vesper Libre Medium
• Bold 700Vesper Libre Bold
• Black 900Vesper Libre Black

About Vesper Libre

Vesper Libre is a serif text family that pairs a Latin alphabet with Devanagari. Its Latin letters have low stroke contrast, wedge-shaped serifs and angled cuts where curves meet stems, which shows in the specimen in the notched joints of b, p and r. According to the official notes, the Devanagari came first: Rob Keller began it in 2006, it shaped the Latin forms, and the Devanagari character set was finished in 2014 together with Kimya Gandhi. Vesper Libre is the web edition of that design, with small details simplified and the character set reduced to keep files light. It ships as four static weights, Regular, Medium, Bold and Black, with 789 glyphs and no italic. The project is led by Mota Italic, a foundry in Mumbai, and published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Vesper Libre works

Hindi and English on one page

Latin and Devanagari were drawn as one design, so mixed-script paragraphs keep the same colour and proportions.

Web articles

This edition was simplified and its character set trimmed for online use, which keeps the four font files small.

Headlines above the same text face

Black 900 sits two steps above Bold, so a headline, a subhead and body copy can all come from Vesper Libre.

Editorial layouts with a firm texture

Low contrast and wedge serifs give paragraphs an even, fairly dark texture that holds on screens.

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

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

Character sets found in the files: devanagari, 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 Vesper Libre

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 Vesper Libre 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: "Vesper Libre";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/VesperLibre-Black.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 900;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Vesper Libre";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/VesperLibre-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Vesper Libre";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/VesperLibre-Medium.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 500;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Vesper Libre";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/VesperLibre-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Vesper Libre", serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Vesper Libre 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=Vesper+Libre:wght@400;500;700;900&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

No italic

All four styles are upright. Emphasis has to come from Medium or Bold.

The weights skip two steps

The family goes Regular 400, Medium 500, Bold 700, Black 900. There is no SemiBold 600 or ExtraBold 800, and no variable file.

A reduced web edition

The official notes describe Vesper Libre as a version with simplified details and a smaller character set than the full Vesper design.

FAQs

Similar fonts

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