Barlow is a slightly rounded, low-contrast grotesk. Jeremy Tribby, a designer based in San Francisco, drew on the visual style of the California public: the number plates, highway signs, buses and trains. You can see it in the sturdy, even letters and the soft corners.
This is the Normal family. It belongs to a superfamily with Semi Condensed and Condensed versions, and each of the three has nine weights in roman and italic. The width is regular here, and the character set covers Latin, Latin Extended and Vietnamese. Google Fonts added Barlow in October 2017.
The ZIP contains 18 static TTF files, Thin to Black in upright and italic.
Best uses for Barlow
- Signage and wayfinding
- Sports and transport branding
- Headlines on busy layouts
- Packaging labels
- Website navigation and UI
Font pairings
Barlow has an industrial feel, so it holds its own next to a plain text face like Open Sans or Source Sans 3. For a serif contrast, Roboto Slab keeps the practical mood.
Licence & credit
Barlow is designed by Jeremy Tribby 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.
Barlow Font Family
License: Personal & Commercial Use
Font Type: Free
Format: TTF
File Size: 0.9 MB
Total Files: 18
