Open Sans
Open Sans
Steve Matteson, 2011
Sans-serif · A website built between 2012 and 2018. Neutral, open, free.
Commissioned by Google and released under an open licence, which is the whole story: a competent, unobjectionable humanist sans that costs nothing made it the default choice for a generation of websites. It shares its skeleton with Matteson's earlier Droid Sans.
The facts
- Designed by
- Steve Matteson
- Released
- 2011
- Classification
- Sans-serif
- What it signals now
- A website built between 2012 and 2018. Neutral, open, free.
Where you have seen it
- An enormous share of the web through Google Fonts
- Many university and government sites
Other typefaces from the 2010s
| Typeface | Year | Designer | What it signals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roboto | 2011 | Christian Robertson | Android. Google. An app. |
| San Francisco | 2014 | Apple | An Apple device, since 2015. |
| Inter | 2017 | Rasmus Andersson | A software product designed after about 2019. Screen-native, neutral, everywhere. |
This page describes the typeface rather than showing it. Displaying a specimen requires a licensed font file and almost none of these may be redistributed, so the descriptions name the letters to look at instead.
Common questions
- Who designed Open Sans?
- Steve Matteson, in 2011.
- What is Open Sans used for?
- A website built between 2012 and 2018. Neutral, open, free. You will have seen it on An enormous share of the web through Google Fonts, Many university and government sites.
Related pages
- Typefaces from the 2010s 4 here
- Akzidenz-Grotesk H. Berthold AG, 1896
- Franklin Gothic Morris Fuller Benton, 1902
- Johnston Edward Johnston, 1916
- Futura Paul Renner, 1927
- Gill Sans Eric Gill, 1928
- Helvetica Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann, 1957
- Univers Adrian Frutiger, 1957
- Optima Hermann Zapf, 1958
Sources
- Official vendor product documentation — At One Place