Google releases its new Google Sans Flex font as open source

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/11/google-sans-flex-font-ubuntu

by CharlesW • 7 months ago

243 110 7 months ago

omgubuntu.co.uk

numbers• 7 months ago

seems like a good step towards making a variable font that allows all forms of text b/c Apple already has SF (fka San Francisco) which has many variants.

hu3• 7 months ago

yep. specially since Apple font license is quite restrictive:

Apple restricts the usage of the typeface by others. It is licensed to registered third-party developers only for the design and development of applications for Apple's platforms. Only SF Pro, SF Compact, SF Mono, SF Arabic, SF Hebrew and New York variants are available for download on Developer website and they are the only SF variants allowed to be used by developers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_(sans-serif_type...

alberth• 7 months ago

If you like variable fonts, no font is better at giving fine tune control than Roboto Flex (also by Google).

Has 12-axis of variables (whereas most only have 1 or 2)

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto+Flex/tester

xnx• 7 months ago

I hadn't noticed they added more font variable controls to Google Fonts: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Google+Sans+Flex/tester

Gualdrapo• 7 months ago

And it's quite cool (and uncommon, in my experience with variable fonts) they're adding a control for roundness

ericmcer• 7 months ago

Oh man, I already spend way too much time stressing about size & weight. This is enough toggles to let you really spend hours trying to get it perfect!

lucb1e5• 7 months ago

Thin weights are eyecandy, but don't forget to also decontrast the color! Nothing screams "made by a designer" like thin grey prose that, if you're lucky and they hired a professional, sits precisely at the minimum of the WCAG contrast legibility standard

alterom• 7 months ago

That's the kind of Flex I'm happy to see from corporations like Google.

tigranbs• 7 months ago

Ahh, this is great! Finally, I can use the `font-stretch` CSS property to make some text components more expressive.

lucb1e5• 7 months ago

Where possible, I've stopped picking fonts that don't distinguish lowercase l and uppercase I. Words virtually always have redundancy (or context in the sentence) and it's fine in 98% of cases, but too often someone sends a token, password, name, or other string where you need to copy it out to another application to see it and just... why? Why bother?

I/O test for Sans Flex: https://snipboard.io/wXCQq5.jpg

It passes the O0 distinction but not the Il one

Example of a font that passes, Ubuntu: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Ubuntu?preview.text=10%20I... (custom license but looks similar to GPL in that you can do what you want besides relicensing it as proprietary or removing credits)

Another one, Nunito Sans, using the Open Font License: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Nunito+Sans?preview.text=1...

IBM Plex Sans is another Open Font License option: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans?preview.text... (it has an unusual capital Q style though)

munchler• 7 months ago

That’s a lowercase “L” vs. uppercase “I” for those of you as confused as I was.

quantummagic• 7 months ago

He inspired me to uninstall Bitstream-Vera-Sans fonts from my system so that his post was no longer a prime example of the problem.

tln• 7 months ago

Thanks, the "1" does look different. The font does have font-variant-numeric: slashed-zero

cloudflare728• 7 months ago

Why would someone spend years developing a front where you can't tell the difference between Il or 0O? Doesn't it hurt their ego at personal level?

jorvi• 7 months ago

Almost no fonts do this by default and instead offer it as context alternate, but I feel a font should always use a dashed or preferably dotted zero. Zero being slightly skinnier than capital O is not enough for rapid visual clarity.

chiefalchemist2• 7 months ago

I believe this font does

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Atkinson+Hyperlegible

fooqux• 7 months ago

I don't understand why we moved away from this. Is it simply aesthetics, or was there something else at play here?

parkersweb• 7 months ago

Many fonts have a disambiguation option. Inter by default doesn't pass the I test - but it can be enabled.

Google Flex Sans supports font-feature-settings: "zero" - but doesn't seem to support lower-case l, upper-case I disambiguation.

apt-apt-apt-apt• 7 months ago

One would think that this would be a fundamental principle in font design, distinguishing letters from each other.

samoyy• 7 months ago

It’s just not a common enough feature of handwriting, I assume.

GaryBluto• 7 months ago

I've stopped picking fonts that don't distinguish lowercase l and uppercase I.

Serif fonts solved this problem generations ago.

adrian_b7• 7 months ago

Yes, but the way in which they have solved this is partially the reason why many sans-serif fonts suck from this point of view.

Serifs have appeared as a feature of the Latin letters of the inscriptions in stone of the Roman Empire, which are the model for the present capital letters.

On the other hand, the model for the present small letters are the letters of the manuscripts of the Carolingian Empire, written with pen (i.e. goose feather) on parchment.

The small letters originally did not have serifs. The small "l" letter had a right hook at its lower end, which distinguished it easily from an "I".

Serifs were added to the small letters, in imitation of the capital letters, only in the first books that were printed with "Antiqua" letters, in Italy, after the invention of printing.

The addition of a serif at the low end of "l" has lead to the removal of the right hook that it had previously. When sans-serif fonts were created in the 19th century, they have removed the serifs from the letters, so by removing the differently-shaped serifs from "I" and "l" they have become hard or impossible to distinguish.

The wiser typeface designers have realized that this is wrong and they have restored to small "l" the low right hook that it had at its origin in the Caroline script, distinguishing it from capital "I" even in a sans-serif font.

Unfortunately, too many sans-serif fonts have continued to perpetuate the mistake of removing the serifs from small "l" without restoring its original low right hook.

giancarlostoro2• 7 months ago

I had a manager who preferred monospaced font, it definitely made it easier in a lot of cases. I also notice a number of them make i l and I and 1 distinct enough.

adrian_b7• 7 months ago

Except for ancient typefaces like Courier, which predate their use in computers, most monospaced fonts that have been created during the last 40 years have been intended for use by programmers or in command-line interfaces.

Therefore having non-ambiguous characters has been an explicit design requirement for them, at least since the Apple Monaco font.

3eb7988a16632• 7 months ago

Not only must the il1 O0 series be distinguishable, but they need to stand on their own. If I only see one in isolation, can I know if that it must be a capital O and not a zero?

radley• 7 months ago

If the font doesn't support ligatures, it might as well be generated by AI.

Marazan2• 7 months ago

monofur - my monospaced programming font of choice for decades now has an almost psychotic dedication to glyph disambiguation, every character is exceedingly distinct.

BrandoElFollito3• 7 months ago

It's really nice, but unfortunately no ligatures.

I use Fira Code (like many) and it is very readable as well. But yours is indeed perfect

chiefalchemist2• 7 months ago

Lately I’ve become a fan of:

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Atkinson+Hyperlegible

Mainly for its attention to detail. It’s careful to make it obvious when it matters. For example, O and 0, lower case L and 1, and others.

dogmatism• 7 months ago

I mean, how can you not like it?

It's hyperlegible!

worble• 7 months ago

Hello fellow Ubuntu font lover.

I have this set as my OS default and also forced for all webpages, I just find it so clear and easy to read. On the occasion that I have to browse the web without it, I don't struggle per-say, but I definitely find that I have to read slower, and find myself rereading words more often.

dialogbox• 7 months ago

I also agree with you on the O0 I'll distinctions importance. So as google open-source it, someone can improved it freely.

lucb1e5• 7 months ago

It's not that level of open. You can't just do a pull request, not only because there's no infrastructure for it but because you also need to change the name. It becomes a different product.

No Modified Version of the Font Software may use the Reserved Font Name

And if you are fine changing the name and releasing it as a separate font, you might as well just type "Ubuntu" and discover that this font already does what you want!

I really don't see the point of designing a font that is worse than what's already out there. What is Google trying to achieve here? Just another headline, giving something openly to the world, good brand publicity? Seems like an expensive way to do it so probably not, but then why

mytdi• 7 months ago

I wonder why the Ubuntu and the IBM Plex Sans fonts use a different style "a" for italic vs non-italic. I like the Ubuntu font and have used it in the past.

danso• 7 months ago

One of the few unqualified improvements that “X” (aka Twitter) made was rendering the usernames in a font that has wings for the lowercase L

DHowett• 7 months ago

I had always wondered if that happened because of a proliferation in folks named EionMusk.

snug• 7 months ago

When I was in Italy, it took me far too long to realize on Google Maps that all the restaurants I was visiting started with "Il" and not the roman numeral two "II"

thaumasiotes2• 7 months ago

Words virtually always have redundancy (or context in the sentence) and it's fine in 98% of cases, but too often someone sends a token, password, name, or other string where you need to copy it out to another application to see it and just... why?

I think the right answer here is to avoid including 1/I/l/O/0 in your tokens. For example, I'm pretty sure that Nintendo gift card codes can't contain those characters?

Brajeshwar2• 7 months ago

This is an Interface font, most suited for User Interfaces (Websites, Apps, etc). Almost all fonts that I have seen that distinguish the “O0 & Il” properly do not look good when used as an Interface font, but look good as an editor or something you do with it (Notes).

For instance, I set Inter[1] as my UI font in Obsidian, but I have set “Atkinson Hyperlegible Next”[2] as my Editor Font. I would gladly use such clean sans-serif fonts (Inter, Flex Sans, Geist, etc.)[3] because they are easy for the human eye to read quickly, even if there is a spelling error, and hence the distinction between the “O0 & Il” would not matter.

So, It Depends on the use case. “Atkinson Hyperlegible Next” is a fantastic, highly readable/recognizable font, but it will look pretty ugly when using it to design interfaces.

1. https://rsms.me/inter/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkinson_Hyperlegible

3. https://vercel.com/font

BrandoElFollito3• 7 months ago

Atkinson Hyperlegible is great, shame that there is no monospaced version. And the slash on the 0 is backwards :)

8cvor6j844qw_d6• 7 months ago

stopped picking fonts that don't distinguish lowercase l and uppercase I

Strongly agree on this, Bitwarden previously used a font that made passwords that contains i (or was it I?) and l difficult to distinguish.

It seems they changed the fonts since the recent UI refresh.

BrandoElFollito3• 7 months ago

To be honest, the key purpose of Bitwarden is to make your password as little readable as possible :)

(Yes, yes, I know about passphrases or multi-word passwords)

I think I needed ince to spell my password, and a chose a letters-only (small case) shorter one, or multi-word

eviks2• 7 months ago

Indeed, and you'd think that over many decades of font design some basic fails like this would not happen as they'd be against the fundamental rules "that every single font designer knows by heart"

left-struck• 7 months ago

It seems like such poor design to make those letters indistinguishable from each other.

For me it comes up often as names of people or places, because those are more likely to be in a font that doesn’t distinguish and also there is no additional redundancy

elevaet• 7 months ago

Are there any great variable and open serif web fonts around?

16bitvoid• 7 months ago

I don't really like serif fonts, but the two that immediately come to mind are Noto Serif and IBM Plex Serif. Both are open source. I know Noto Serif is variable, but not sure about IBM Plex.

levocardia• 7 months ago

Both Plex variants are really wonderful fonts

jszymborski• 7 months ago

Inter is pretty great.

CharlesW• 7 months ago

Lots! Start with the Google Fonts browser. This link should take you directly to a variable + serif list, and from there you can drill down into sub-styles, focus more on those with more axis, more styles, etc.: https://fonts.google.com/?categoryFilters=Technology:%2FTech...

vincent-manis• 7 months ago

I am very fond of Merriweather (which I recently saw on a list of over-used fonts, for those who believe that you should use a different obscure and, hopefully, hard to read font in every document). It pairs nicely with Merriweather Sans, Cascadia Code, and for math Libertinus Modern, though I do have to tweak ex-heights to match.

copperx• 7 months ago

Great, but is it free of DEI? can it be used in official documents?

Svoka2• 7 months ago

It seems it is actively anti-DEI: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Google+Sans+Flex?preview.t...

jrpelkonen• 7 months ago

The round variant looks like a fatty lacking warrior ethos. Unsuitable for Department of War. /s

EdwardDiego2• 7 months ago

From now on, we're running the Army like a frat party. No fat chicks! No fuggos! And if you're a fat dude, you better be damn funny!

-- Secretary of War ~~Pete Hegseth~~ Colin Jost.

hbn2• 7 months ago

I assume this is a shot at the White House but announcing an "anti-racist font" is totally up Google's alley

I know I've seen Mozilla proudly pat themselves on the back in their announcement of anti-racist Firefox themes

Rebelgecko• 7 months ago

Google has been "anti-woke" since January or so. See the shutdown of groups for disabled employee, Dept of War "Manifest Destiny" contract, etc

Svoka2• 7 months ago

I am a simple person. Not a designer. But for all fonts I type 'iIlL0Oo' and if I can't tell what is what I skip it.

This font fails hard.

eahm• 7 months ago

1 too: https://fonts.google.com/?preview.text=i1IlL0Oo

IMO Ubuntu Mono and Ubuntu Sans Mono are two of the best fonts ever made, comparable to Consolas, which I think it's still the best monospace font... talking about monospace fonts.

Funny enough I think Reddit Mono is a very good monospace font too https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Reddit+Mono?preview.text=i...

And Hack: https://dafont.com/hack.font?text=i1IlL0Oo

For monospace fonts only:

https://fonts.google.com/?preview.text=i1IlL0Oo&categoryFilt...

https://dafont.com/theme.php?cat=503&text=i1IlL0Oo

mosura• 7 months ago

Now we all have high density screens serifs are going to make a comeback, if for no other reason than that new sans-serif fonts have developed this distinctly childish aura. This is not in the same league as Frutiger or Univers.

hbn2• 7 months ago

Maybe a good excuse to get back into playing around with Coldtype again

https://coldtype.goodhertz.com/introduction.html

torbengee• 7 months ago

I've tried so many fonts in my coding life, but I think I've finally found my forever font: JetBrains Mono. Crisp, all characters distinguishable, slightly larger lowercase for better reading ...

I recently compared it once more to others – https://www.programmingfonts.org/ makes it easy to narrow down to your favourites one by one ... JetBrains Mono still wins. :)

amelius2• 7 months ago

My favorite coding font: Iosevka Term.

https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka

It takes a day or so to get used to the condensed form factor, but after that you can enjoy much more horizontal space in your terminal windows.

There is one downside: all the other fonts will look bulky :)

pdimitar3• 7 months ago

I like that family of fonts but ultimately couldn't live with how tall they are. I want to have 50-60 lines of code on my screen. With it I had 35-40.

0xfab1• 7 months ago

It's also what I've settled into, after using Consolas, Fira Code, and Inconsolata.

adrian_b7• 7 months ago

I also prefer JetBrains Mono, after using a very large number of other programming typefaces in the past.

While there are a few other programming fonts with a very similar quality, for myself JetBrains Mono has a distinctive advantage: it includes a much greater character set than any other good programming font that I have ever tested (DejaVu Sans Mono also has a big character set, but it is definitely uglier), for instance it has a lot of mathematical symbols that I need.

3eb7988a16632• 7 months ago

There is also CodingFont if you want to do a tournament selection to find your preference.

https://www.codingfont.com/

YesBox• 7 months ago

heh, Im using this font in my game. Picking fonts is hard, and I feel like I've just dipped my toe in the water so far. Im not 100% satisfied with the non-monospace font I use (Adobe Source Sans), but I have more important things to focus on right now

spankalee• 7 months ago

Google Sans isn't a coding font though.

purplehat_• 7 months ago

Thanks for sharing this!!

I like using silly fonts, e.g. Comic Sans Mono has been my daily driver for the past year or so, and it's really fun to see the Minecraft fonts and old DOS and VT323 fonts. If anyone's into retro computing, it's worth checking those out, particularly the website link for the IBM VGA 9x16, which has loads and loads more old fonts.

I think I'll try using Monocraft in the shell for a while and see if it works well for me, though I might stick to Comic Sans for actual coding :)

ziml77• 7 months ago

Funny, that's my one of my least favorite monospace fonts. My favorite is PragmataPro. I love how the characters are compact yet very readable.

freedomben• 7 months ago

I don't love this new font as others have already pointed out, there's not enough distinction between some letters[1].

However, the general movement toward redistributable and license-friendly fonts is wonderful and I'm very happy to see it continue. As someone who has had to deal with font licensing hell in the past, having these available is a huge improvement. Even just setting up my personal linux systems and having actually usable fonts available is a massive improvement, before even getting into trying to build apps/websites/etc. Many thanks to Google and any others who are releasing these!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46247559 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46247693

adrian_b7• 7 months ago

I agree with you, but this font is less notable for its glyph design than for the fact that you can obtain many variations of it by choosing suitable parameter values (hence the "Flex" name).

This is a feature that few, if any, open source typefaces possess.

Being open source, the same techniques can be reused in the design of another parametrized font, with less ambiguous glyphs.

hathawsh• 7 months ago

as well as an axis for rounded terminals (as in terminals in letters, not command-line apps).

Now I want to see a rounded terminal (as in command-line apps, not terminals in letters.) Would I type in a circle? Sounds cool.

kridsdale1• 7 months ago

The earliest CRT terminals were round.

wasting_time• 7 months ago

Perhaps they are trying to improve the Gemini performance on https://clocks.brianmoore.com/ .

adrian_b7• 7 months ago

Letters with rounded terminals are especially popular for public signage in a few Asian countries, e.g. Japan and Korea.

That is why Microsoft Windows has included such a rounded font for the Korean script: Gulim. On Windows, if you want to render a text with Latin letters with rounded ends, you can use Gulim for the normal text, coupled with Arial Round for the bold text.

On MacOS, there was a Hiragino Maru Gothic rounded font for Japanese (where also the Latin letters are rounded). I no longer use Apple computers, so I do not know whether the Hiragino fonts have remained the fonts provided for Japanese.

tasuki• 7 months ago

Not particularly imaginative/interesting? I don't see how it's better than say Roboto. And I'm not even that huge a fan of Roboto...

tolerance• 7 months ago

I understand that there are many good reasons not to want to use fonts where the lowercase L and uppercase I are indistinguishable.

But am I the only one who actually prefers both to be relatively identical? Or at least the lowercase L must not have any quiggles or crooks? I like em both north-south. 12:30.

I think typically the I will be a little thicker than the i for regular (text? roman?) weights and below.

aucisson_masque• 7 months ago

Does it matter ?

No really, I'm not trying to be edgy. Does the font we're using to read a document matters??

Last time I checked, scientist agreed that the best for an average user is the font you're used to. Serif, sans serif,.. didn't matter. Just keep using the one you always used.

So I don't get why every so often, Google work on a new font. Pick one and stick to it, user don't care.

Or am I missing something ?

BTW, personnel opinion but the only fonts i found to really look better than anything else were apple fonts. They don't make things easier to read but they just look so nice whereas Google always feel meh.

tomcatfish• 7 months ago

Yes, it matters, and big companies can do fantastic things by designing extremely expansive fonts which make it easy to include users speaking plenty of languages that we developers don't even know about.

lucb1e5• 7 months ago

It makes a big difference for legibility which font you pick. But I see what you mean in that, if the font is "just fine" (not trying to be fancy or, say, in futuristic style for a game or something), then why bother making yet another "just fine" font as Google has done here? There's already so many sans-serif fonts that no person could tell apart if they don't see them directly side-by-side and are asked to spot the difference. For this reason, I also wonder why this release matters at all

EdwardDiego2• 7 months ago

According to Secretary of State, fonts can be woke now, so I guess?

avree• 7 months ago

Don't think he ever described it as "woke". https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/full_text_of_marco_rubio_...

crazygringo• 7 months ago

I'm very confused. This is the font that matches the Google branding, and that they started using as a UX font in Gmail, Docs, etc.

I hate it in UX because it's so "geometric" -- works well for a logo, but not body text, so it's just a bizarre choice for UX. Unlike Roboto which continues to be great for that. (Google Sans is fine as display text though -- headings, logo, etc.)

But my understanding was that Google wanted to differentiate its first-party apps from other Android apps with a proprietary Google font.

But now they're opening that font up for everyone to use, so Google's apps will no longer look uniquely Google-branded.

I'm so confused what the heck is going on over there in Mountain View.

txtsd• 7 months ago

Open source? Where's the repo for its source code?

microflash• 7 months ago

There’s also Google Sans Code, the monospace companion of Google Sans family.

https://github.com/googlefonts/googlesans-code

mrankin• 7 months ago

It’s time we all decided to code using the shavian alphabet. That will put all of these font issues to rest for sure. ;)

Google releases its new Google Sans Flex font as open source

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