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Open Sans

Designed by Steve Matteson

About

Open Sans is a humanist sans serif typeface designed by Steve Matteson, Type Director of Ascender Corp. This version contains the complete 897 character set, which includes the standard ISO Latin 1, Latin CE, Greek and Cyrillic character sets. Open Sans was designed with an upright stress, open forms and a neutral, yet friendly appearance. It was optimized for print, web, and mobile interfaces, and has excellent legibility characteristics in its letterforms.

In March 2021, the family has been updated to a variable font family and it also includes Hebrew, and unified and simplified the licensing under OFL.

To contribute, see github.com/googlefonts/opensans

Designer

Steve Matteson is a typeface designer based in Louisville, CO. Owner of Matteson Typographics and formerly Type Director for Monotype and Ascender Corp. Steve is an avid cyclist, musician and letterpress printer.

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Choosing type

When you have some text, how can you choose a typeface? Many people—professional designers included—go through an app’s font menu until we find one we like. But the aim of this Google Fonts Knowledge module is to show that there are many considerations that can improve our type choices. By setting some useful constraints to aid our type selection, we can also develop a critical eye for analyzing type along the way.

Open Sans - Google Fonts