In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than serif typefaces. They are often used to convey simplicity and modernity or minimalism. For the purposes of type classification, sans-serif designs are usually divided into these major groups: § Grotesque, § Neo-grotesque, § Geometric, § Humanist, and § Other or mixed.
A typeface is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size, weight, slope, width, and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
Arial is a sans-serif typeface in the neo-grotesque style. Fonts from the Arial family are included with all versions of Microsoft Windows after Windows 3.1, as well as in other Microsoft programs, Apple's macOS, and many PostScript 3 printers. In Office 2007, Arial was replaced by Calibri as the default typeface in PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook.
Futura is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Paul Renner and released in 1927. It was designed as a contribution on the New Frankfurt-project. It is based on geometric shapes, especially the circle, similar in spirit to the Bauhaus design style of the period. It was developed as a typeface by the Bauer Type Foundry, in competition with Ludwig & Mayer's seminal Erbar typeface of 1926.
Univers is a sans-serif typeface family designed by Adrian Frutiger and released by his employer Deberny & Peignot in 1957. Classified as a neo-grotesque sans-serif, one based on the model of nineteenth-century German typefaces such as Akzidenz-Grotesk, it was notable for its availability from the moment of its launch in a comprehensive range of weights and widths. The original marketing for Univers deliberately referenced the periodic table to emphasise its scope.
Roboto is a neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface family developed by Google as the system font for its mobile operating system Android, and released in 2011 for Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich".
Oblique type is a form of type that slants slightly to the right, used for the same purposes as italic type. Unlike italic type, however, it does not use different glyph shapes; it uses the same glyphs as roman type, except slanted. Oblique and italic type are technical terms to distinguish between the two ways of creating slanted font styles; oblique designs may be labelled italic by companies selling fonts or by computer programs. Oblique designs may also be called slanted or sloped roman styles. Oblique fonts, as supplied by a font designer, may be simply slanted, but this is often not the case: many have slight corrections made to them to give curves more consistent widths, so they retain the proportions of counters and the thick-and-thin quality of strokes from the regular design.
In metal typesetting, a font or fount is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface, defined as the set of fonts that share an overall design. For instance, the typeface Bauer Bodoni includes fonts "Roman", "bold" and "italic"; each of these exists in a variety of sizes.
Thesis is a large typeface family designed by Luc(as) de Groot. The typefaces were designed between 1994 and 1999 to provide a modern humanist family. Each typeface is available in a variety of weights as well as in italic. Originally released by FontFont in 1994, it has been sold by de Groot through his imprint LucasFonts since 2000.
Microsoft Sans Serif is a sans-serif typeface introduced with early Microsoft Windows versions. It is the successor of MS Sans Serif, formerly Helv, a proportional bitmap font introduced in Windows 1.0. Both typefaces are very similar in design to Arial and Helvetica. The typeface was designed to match the MS Sans bitmap included in the early releases of Microsoft Windows.
Bank Gothic is a rectilinear geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Morris Fuller Benton for American Type Founders and released in 1930. The design has become popular from the late twentieth century to suggest a science-fiction, military, corporate, or sports aesthetic.
Avenir is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1987 and released in 1988 by Linotype GmbH.
Web typography, like typography generally, is the design of pages – their layout and typeface choices. Unlike traditional print-based typography, pages intended for display on the World Wide Web have additional technical challenges and – given its ability to change the presentation dynamically – additional opportunities. Early web page designs were very simple due to technology limitations; modern designs use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript and other techniques to deliver the typographer's and the client's vision.
Open Sans is an open source humanist sans-serif typeface that was designed by Steve Matteson under commission from Google. It was released in 2011 and is based on his earlier design called Droid Sans, which was specifically created for Android mobile devices but with slight modifications to its width.
IBM Plex is an open source typeface superfamily conceptually designed and developed by Mike Abbink at IBM in collaboration with Bold Monday to reflect the design principles of IBM and to be used for all brand material across the company internationally. Plex replaces Helvetica as the IBM corporate typeface after more than fifty years, freeing the company from extensive license payments in the process.
Atkinson Hyperlegible is a freely available typeface built around a grotesque sans-serif core, intended to be optimally legible for readers who are partially visually impaired, with all characters maximally distinguishable from one another. It was developed by the Braille Institute of America in collaboration with Applied Design Works and is available under the SIL Open Font License. It won Fast Company's Innovation by Design Award for Graphic Design in 2019 and was shortlisted for a graphic design award by Dezeen in 2020.
Montserrat is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Argentine graphic designer Julieta Ulanovsky and released in 2011. It was inspired by posters, signs and painted windows from the first half of the twentieth century, seen in the historic Montserrat neighbourhood of Buenos Aires.
East Asian typography is the application of typography to the writing systems used for the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese languages. Scripts represented in East Asian typography include Chinese characters, kana, and hangul.
Archivo is a sans-serif typeface designed by Héctor Gatti and released in 2012. It is available on the website of the type foundry Omnibus Type. In 2016, it received an award in the Tipos Latinos type design competition in Latin America. The typeface comes in two main variants, Archivo Narrow and Archivo Black.
