Interface is a font for highly legible text on computer screens.
Download the latest release
or try it out in the playground
Interface 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.
Using the font is as easy as download & installing locally on your computer.
You're free to bundle copies of Interface with your software, even if it's commercial and you charge money for your software. Interface can also be used on the web by either hosting the font files yourself or by including this CSS:
@import url('https://rsms.me/interface/interface.css');
Use the following CSS rules to specify these families:
font-family: Interface, sans-serif;
Interface 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 Interface, 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 monospaced 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 raster–spcific UPM, but crafting glyphs and kerning in a way that made for more variation in the rythm and smoother vertical and horizontal stems. As Interface was being developed, it was tested on an internal version of Figma—where the author of Interface works as a designer—and slowly imporved upon based on experience and feedback.
Interface 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.