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Inter UI is a typeface specially designed for user interfaces with focus on high legibility of small-to-medium sized text on computer screens.
The family features a tall x-height to aid in readability of mixed-case and lower-case text. Several OpenType features are provided as well, like contextual alternates that adjusts punctuation depending on the shape of surrounding glyphs, slashed zero for when you need to disambiguate "0" from "o", tabular numbers, etc.
Using the font is as easy as download & installing locally on your computer.
You're free to bundle copies of Inter UI with your software, even if it's commercial and you charge money for your software. Inter UI can also be used on the web by either hosting the font files yourself or by including this CSS:
@import url('https://rsms.me/inter/inter-ui.css');
Use the following CSS rules to specify the Inter UI family:
font-family: 'Inter UI', sans-serif;
Font size dp —> letter spacing em
There's of course no absolute right or wrong when it comes to expressing yourself with typography, but Inter UI Dynamic Metrics provides guidelines for good typography. You simply provide the optical font size, and the tracking and leading is calculated for you to produce the best results.
Learn about Dynamic Metrics —>
Inter UI is a free and open source font family. You are free to use this font in almost any way imaginable. Refer to the SIL Open Font License 1.1 for exact details on what the conditions and restrictions are.
There are currently four weights
calt)
tnum)
zero)
frac)
ss01)
case)
Also includes some
Localized Forms (locl
),
Numerators (numr
) and
Denominators (dnom
).
Inter UI started out in late 2016 as an experiment to build a perfectly pixel-fitting font at a specific small size (11px.) The idea was that by crafting a font in a particular way, with a particular coordinate system (Units Per EM), and for a particular target rasterization size (11), it would be possible to get the best of both sharpness and readability.
However after a few months of using an early version of Inter UI, it dawned on everyone exposed to the test that this approach had some serious real-world problems. Most notably that it was really hard to read longer text. Because of the pixel-aligning nature of that approach, the font took an almost mono-spaced appearance, making it really easy to read numbers, punctuation and very short words, but eye-straining to read anything longer.
The project was rebooted with a different approach, sticking with the specific UPM, but crafting glyphs and kerning in a way that made for more variation in the rhythm and smoother vertical and horizontal stems. As Inter UI was being developed, it was tested on an internal version of Figma—where the author of Inter UI works as a designer—and slowly improved upon based on experience and feedback.
Inter UI works great for English-language text, and pretty well for other Latin and Cyrillic languages. There's still a lot of work to be done, and contributions are warmly welcomed. The playground contains a lot of samples, including some common non English-language words in the playground.
Please refer to the glyph repertoire for an overview of currently-available glyphs and their quality.
font-feature-settings. In Figma you can access features via the Advanced Typography panel. In Illustrator, Photoshop and friends, you can access features via the Characters and OpenType panels. Sketch doesn't provide a UI for configuring font features, but there's a workaround using macOS's native font UI.
https://rsms.me/inter/inter-ui.cssand associated font files very reliable and fast throughout the world.