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Work Sans

A grotesque-based sans tuned for screen text at 14 to 48 pixels, variable across nine weights with italics.

Sans Serif 18 styles · variable by Wei Huang OFL

Download family 678 KB Type your own text

Work Sans is a sans serif family by Wei Huang, based loosely on early grotesques and simplified for screens. Work Sans is a variable font with nine weights from Thin 100 to Black 900 and matching italics, 18 styles, with 1,338 glyphs. It is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and suits interface text, body copy and headings.

Work Sans font preview card
Preview drawn by trendhub from the font files.
Designer
Wei Huang
Classification
Sans Serif
License
SIL Open Font License 1.1
Styles
18 9 weights, with italics
Variable font
Yes Weight 100–900
Glyphs
1,338
Languages checked
25 see the list
Last updated
version 2.012
Used for
HeadlinesBody textInterfacesBrandingBold

Official source: Google Fonts. Facts on this page were read from the font files and the source’s published data.

Try Work Sans

Sample text

Type over the sample to test your own words. The preview loads a Latin subset of Work Sans; the download contains the complete files.

Work Sans font specimen: alphabet, numerals and weights
Work Sans specimen: alphabet, numerals and weights. Image drawn by trendhub from the font files.

Weights and styles

  • Thin 100Work Sans Thin Thin Italic
  • ExtraLight 200Work Sans ExtraLight ExtraLight Italic
  • Light 300Work Sans Light Light Italic
  • Regular 400Work Sans Regular Italic
  • Medium 500Work Sans Medium Medium Italic
  • SemiBold 600Work Sans SemiBold SemiBold Italic
  • Bold 700Work Sans Bold Bold Italic
  • ExtraBold 800Work Sans ExtraBold ExtraBold Italic
  • Black 900Work Sans Black Black Italic

Work Sans is a variable font: the download holds the whole weight range in one file per style, and the named weights above are positions on that range.

About Work Sans

Work Sans is a sans serif family that takes early grotesque typefaces as a loose model. The specimen shows the family traits: a two-storey a and g, a wide, open lowercase, a spurred G and slightly irregular widths that keep it from looking geometric. Wei Huang, a type designer from Australia, leads the project. The middle weights are optimised for text on screen at roughly 14 to 48 pixels, and the weights near either extreme are intended for display use; details were simplified for screen resolutions, with accents drawn larger than they would be for print. The family has nine weights from Thin to Black with italics, 18 styles on a weight axis from 100 to 900, and became variable in February 2020. Its 1,338 glyphs cover Latin, Latin Extended and Vietnamese, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Work Sans works

Interface and body text on the web
Regular and the weights around it are tuned for 14 to 48 pixel text, the range of most web copy and UI labels.
Display headlines
Thin 100 and Black 900 are drawn for large sizes, giving a page a hairline or a very heavy title from the same family.
Brand systems for digital products
Eighteen named instances from two files cover logotype, marketing pages and product screens.
Text with heavy use of accents
Enlarged diacritics stay visible at small sizes in languages such as Vietnamese, Czech or Turkish.
Slide decks and reports
The open grotesque forms read well on projectors and in exported PDFs.

Glyphs

!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~¡¢

Latin and Latin Extended characters in the preview subset; the complete family has 1,338 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

SIL Open Font License 1.1Copyright 2019 The Work Sans Project Authors (https://github.com/weiweihuanghuang/Work-Sans)

What the license allows

  • Use the fonts in personal and commercial work, in print, on the web and in apps.
  • Modify the fonts and build new versions from them.
  • Redistribute the fonts, on their own or bundled with software, as long as the license text and copyright notice go with them.

Conditions

  • The fonts cannot be sold by themselves.
  • A modified version must stay under the same license and cannot use a Reserved Font Name without the copyright holder's permission.
  • The authors' names cannot be used to promote a modified version without permission.

This is a short summary, not legal advice. The license text decides: read the full OFL text. A copy is included in the download.

Fonts that pair with Work Sans

Amiri Serif

Work Sans is sans serif and Amiri is serif (2 weights): the difference in structure separates headings from text.

Arvo Slab Serif

Work Sans is sans serif and Arvo is slab serif (2 weights): the difference in structure separates headings from text.

DM Mono Monospace

DM Mono is a monospace family (3 weights) for code and figures next to Work Sans as the text face.

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 Work Sans 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.

CSS, self-hosted
@font-face {
  font-family: "Work Sans";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/WorkSans-Italic-VariableFont_wght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 100 900;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Work Sans";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/WorkSans-VariableFont_wght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 100 900;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

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

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Work Sans with this markup:

HTML, Google Fonts

Things to know

Thin is hairline-thin
A 2015 update made Thin 100 match the earlier Hairline design, and ExtraLight and Light were adjusted with it.
Drawn for screens
Shapes and accents are simplified for screen resolutions; the official notes mention a separate version for desktop applications on the project page.
Two variable files
Roman and italic each carry the weight axis from 100 to 900.

FAQs

Is Work Sans free for commercial use?

Yes. Work Sans is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which allows use in personal and commercial work, modification and redistribution. The font cannot be sold on its own, and modified versions stay under the same license.

Who designed Work Sans?

Work Sans was designed by Wei Huang, an Australian type designer who leads the project.

How many weights does Work Sans have?

Work Sans has nine weights, from Thin 100 to Black 900, each with an italic, which makes 18 styles.

Is Work Sans a variable font?

Yes. Work Sans is a variable font with a weight axis from 100 to 900; it was upgraded to variable in February 2020.

Which languages does Work Sans support?

Work Sans includes the letters needed for English and other Latin-script languages such as French, German, Spanish, Turkish, Polish, Czech and Vietnamese.

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