Zeyada

Try Zeyada

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Zeyada Regular

About Zeyada

Zeyada is a handwriting typeface drawn from the everyday writing of one person, a young mother, according to the official notes. The font takes its name from a young Ethiopian woman whose schooling that writer's family pays for. Its strokes are thin and even, like a fine pen, and the letters lean a little to the right. Lowercase letters are small beside the tall capitals, and f, g, j and y end in long open loops that reach far below the line. Some letters touch their neighbours while others stand apart, so the texture sits between print and cursive. The capital A begins with a loop on its left side, and the numerals differ in height and tilt. Zeyada has one Regular style and 346 glyphs in the Latin and Latin Extended character sets. Kimberly Geswein designed it, and it is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Zeyada works

Margin notes and annotations

Thin, uneven pen strokes read as something jotted by hand, which sets a comment or arrow label apart from the typeset layout around it.

Greeting cards and personal invitations

Because Zeyada comes from a real person's handwriting, a short greeting or a name looks written rather than typeset.

Quote graphics

The looping descenders of f, g, j and y fill the space under a short phrase set large on a social media image.

Journals, planners and scrapbook pages

Partly joined letters and digits of varying height match the look of entries filled in by pen.

Sign-offs under a letter

A first name in the tall, looped capitals and small lowercase stands in for a handwritten closing line.

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
• Hungarian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Estonian

Character sets found in the files: 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 Zeyada

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

body {
  font-family: "Zeyada", cursive;
}

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

Things to know

One style, no bold or italic

Zeyada has a single Regular file with 346 glyphs. It is not a variable font.

Small lowercase

In the specimen the lowercase letters are far shorter than the capitals, so Zeyada looks smaller than other fonts at the same point size and needs a larger setting.

Deep descender loops

The loops of f, g, j and y drop well below the baseline. Tight line spacing lets them run into the line beneath.

Only partly connected

The official notes describe the design as slightly connected and neither a standard cursive nor a standard print hand; the specimen shows joins between some letters and gaps between others.

FAQs

Similar fonts

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