Steve Matteson, Type Director of Ascender Corp, designed Open Sans as a humanist sans serif. The letters have an upright stress and open shapes, and the overall tone is neutral but friendly, which is why the font suits text that has to stay quiet and readable.
The character set is large at 897 characters, including Latin, Latin Extended, Greek and Cyrillic. In March 2021 the family became a variable font, Hebrew was added and the licensing was simplified under the OFL. The variable version has a weight axis from 300 to 800 and a width axis from 75 to 100, so narrower settings are available without a separate family.
Open Sans was optimised for print, web and mobile interfaces. The ZIP contains 10 static TTF files made from the variable fonts, plus the two variable files themselves.
Best uses for Open Sans
- Body copy on websites and blogs
- Mobile app text
- Printed brochures and documents
- Email templates
- Slides that need to stay readable on any screen
Font pairings
Open Sans is plain enough to sit under almost any headline font. Merriweather or Playfair Display add a serif heading, while Oswald gives titles a tighter, taller voice.
Licence & credit
Open Sans is designed by Steve Matteson and released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. That makes it free for personal and commercial use: logos, packaging, websites, apps, videos and print. You can bundle it in your own projects and modify it. You cannot sell the font files by themselves, and the licence text stays with them. Our guide to the SIL Open Font License explains what that means in practice. The family is also on Google Fonts and its source is on the project page.
Open Sans Font Family
License: Personal & Commercial Use
Font Type: Free
Format: TTF
File Size: 1.5 MB
Total Files: 12
