Voltaire

Try Voltaire

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Voltaire Regular

About Voltaire

Voltaire is a condensed sans serif with nearly even stroke weight and a semi-geometric construction. In the specimen A and V come to sharp points, round letters such as O and C are narrow ovals, and the lowercase is tall, so a line of text takes little horizontal space. According to its makers the forms follow the lettering of 20th-century Swedish posters, and the face is intended to work from medium text sizes up to display sizes. There is a single Regular style of 970 glyphs; an update dated January 2023 widened the Latin language coverage and added kerning, and the character set now includes Vietnamese. The catalogue credits Yvonne Schüttler, while the font files also name Eben Sorkin and Emma Marichal, with Sorkin Type Co. as manufacturer. Voltaire is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Voltaire works

Poster and flyer headlines

The forms come from Swedish poster lettering, and the narrow width lets a long title run large across a single line.

Navigation and tabs

Condensed letters fit more menu items into a fixed bar than a normal-width sans of the same size.

Subheads and pull quotes

The makers describe the face as usable from medium text sizes, so decks and intro lines are within its range.

Narrow labels and packaging panels

Even stroke weight and pointed A and V stay clear on a tall, slim label where width is short.

Vietnamese and Central European titles

With 970 glyphs, accented titles in Vietnamese, Polish or Turkish stay in the same face.

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

Character sets found in the files: 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 Voltaire

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

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

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

Things to know

One weight only

Voltaire is a single Regular file. Emphasis has to come from size, colour or a second family, because there is no bold or italic.

Credits differ between sources

The catalogue lists Yvonne Schüttler alone; the name table inside the font lists Yvonne Schüttler, Eben Sorkin and Emma Marichal.

Kerning arrived with the 2023 update

The official notes date the expansion of Latin coverage and the addition of kerning to January 2023, so older copies of the file behave differently.

FAQs

Collections with Voltaire

• Condensed fonts for headlines

  Narrow sans-serif and serif display fonts that set tall, compact headlines in limited width, from hairline to heavy.

Similar fonts

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