Explore Google Sans Flex: Free Open‑Source Variable Font

Open‑source release

On 17 November 2023 Google released the Google Sans Flex font family under an open‑source licence and made the files available through Google Fonts.

License

The family is distributed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which permits free use, modification, redistribution and embedding in commercial products without any fee.

Variable font architecture

Google Sans Flex is a single variable font that defines nine axes:

wght – weight from 100 (Thin) to 900 (Black)

wdth – width (condensed to expanded)

opsz – optical size

GRAD – stroke roundness

additional axes for italics, slant and other stylistic controls as documented on the Google Fonts page

These axes can be controlled via CSS font-variation-settings or the shorthand properties font-weight, font-stretch, and font-optical-sizing.

Language coverage

The family supports the full set of Latin‑based scripts used by English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and other Western languages. No CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) glyphs are included.

Getting the font

Download the variable font files (e.g., GoogleSansFlex[wght,wdth,opsz,GRAD].ttf) from the Google Fonts page: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Google+Sans+Flex

Usage example

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Google Sans Flex';
  src: url('https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/googlesansflex/v1/GoogleSansFlex[wght,wdth,opsz,GRAD].ttf') format('truetype');
  font-weight: 100 900;      /* wght axis */
  font-stretch: 75% 125%;    /* wdth axis */
  font-optical-sizing: auto;/* opsz axis */
}

h1 {
  font-family: 'Google Sans Flex', sans-serif;
  font-variation-settings: 'GRAD' 0; /* 0 = sharp, 1 = rounded */
}