Google first announced its Roboto font back in 2011 as part of Ice Cream Sandwich after Matias Duarte joined the search giant, becoming the font of choice for the company’s apps before going fully open source a few years later in 2015. A new version of the font has been unveiled by Google which is called Roboto Serif and promises to be comfortable to read in any size or format.
The new font joins the Roboto superfamily which includes Roboto, Mono, Slab, Condensed, and now also the Serif variant which aims to feel ‘comfortable next to a sans-serif and not to feel cluttered’.
“Roboto Serif is a variable typeface family designed to create a comfortable and frictionless reading experience. Minimal and highly functional, it is useful anywhere (even for app interfaces) due to the extensive set of weights and widths across a broad range of optical sizes. While it was carefully crafted to work well in digital media, across the full scope of sizes and resolutions we have today, it is just as comfortable to read and work in print media.“
In order to create Roboto Serif, letterforms were “atomized” and broken down into their elemental parts before being rebuilt by experimenting with proportions, contrast and terminal types, and also serif shapes to discover what was legible for each individual character.
You can download the Roboto Serif font today under the Open Font License and use it freely in your products and projects whether it’s print, digital, commercial, or domestic.
