Cal Sans v2

Cal Sans is an open-source variable font built for product design and brand in the same breath. One file spans fine-print UI at 8 pt through hero display at 45, adapting its proportions, spacing, and geometry continuously along the way.

Write it once:

font-family: "Cal Sans";
font-optical-sizing: auto;

That's the whole integration. The font handles the rest.

Commissioned by Peer Richelsen for Cal.com. Drawn, engineered, and shipped by WORDMARK. Free for commercial and personal use, thanks to the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. Available now via NPM, coming to Google Fonts, and with your help could come to Adobe Fonts via UserVoice request.

Like its namesake product, Cal Sans UI, Cal Sans Text, and Cal Sans Geo are easy to use. Every vector is placed to balance the geometry and flow just right for you.

If Inter is Univers and Geist is Helvetica, Cal Sans is Futura.

Not the hundredth revival of the shapes; a return of the system. Bauer cut the original in metal size by size, down to 6 pt, and that discipline is what the digital revivals flattened into one drawing, scaled. Cal Sans brings it back. The 45 pt and the 10 pt styles are separate drawings: corners blunt as sizes fall, overshoots ease, spacing is cut per size and keeps widening through OpenType below 10 pt, and at 8 pt the a grows a tail for the hardest settings. The geometry is Renner's ideal. The sizes are how it reads.

The acid test for legibility is to simulate the inevitable bad conditions. This separates the beautiful type designs from the dryly functional. I recommend blurring it. This simulates quickly-moving eyes, poor light, a far screen, or degenerative optical conditions.

GEOM is the axis the others orbit. Slide it and the letterforms travel from accessibility-first neutrality to full geometry, landing on four named families as they go:

Four typefaces in one axis. In the standard build, compatible letterforms switch cleanly at the boundaries. In Cal Sans Flex, they even morph between each other, humanist flowing into geometric mid-slide.

Set the weight, 400 to 700. Raise the ascenders with YTAS for taller, airier headlines. Sharpen the corners with SHRP for display work. Lean into the real italics, drawn at 9.5° and powered by Sebastian Carewe's Italify, not slanted by the browser.

The named instances cover one optical size and the four weights per family. Every other axis is a tweak from there. That's deliberate: instances are the starting points, the axes are the range.

Full axis documentation lives in fonts/README.

Two measurements decide whether a font behaves in a component: how tall the lowercase runs against the caps, and how far the line box sits off cap-center. Cal Sans UI Text holds its x-height at 71.5% of cap height, the classic UI proportion, not the taller lowercase of Inter and SF Pro. Descenders get 23% of the em, so mixed-case labels still read as mixed case at 14px. And the line box is cap-centred to within 0.02 em: the space above the capitals matches the space below the baseline, so a label sits in the optical middle of a button, badge or input. No nudging, no one-pixel padding hack.

As a variable font, static font, or custom build, Cal Sans v2 is one of the most adaptable typographic systems available.

Availability: Modern browsers and font feature-rich applications like Framer, Figma, Photoshop/InDesign/Illustrator/AfterEffects, and Affinity.

Cal Sans began as a font that had to operate in two worlds: mild-mannered UI and braggadocious marketing. It grew into four, adding a highbrow Geo set that would make Ed Benguiat and Paul Renner proud, and an A11y set drawn for even easier reading. Every one of them lives on a single variable slider.

Availability: Modern browsers and font feature-rich applications like Framer, Figma, Photoshop/InDesign/Illustrator/AfterEffects, and Affinity, served via NPM. Not available from the Google Fonts API.

Twenty stylistic sets and forty-two character variants, ready to toggle wherever features are exposed. See OpenType features below for the full catalog.

Availability: ReCal Sans Font Builder; the result works anywhere you can upload a font, like PowerPoint or Canva.

Choose new defaults and axis configurations, and freeze tabular figures and other OpenType features into something new, online, no command line or font software needed. Your favorite settings become the font's only settings. Hosting for custom builds is available too.

Swapping a UI font shouldn’t mean re-tuning every button, badge and input. At text sizes, Cal Sans is drawn to fit the components you already have: the same space as the fonts they were tuned for, with labels that hold their shape and sit centered.

Cal Sans is drawn to the same vertical proportions as the system and open-source faces interfaces already ship with, so at the same font-size it sits in the same space.

Above, each face is set at an equal size and stacked on one baseline. Cal Sans is the solid shape; the others are outlines. Every one of them has capitals within 3% of Cal Sans’s, and Cal Sans holds its x-height at 71.5% of cap height, inside the band those faces span. Measured at the Text UI instance (opsz 10, GEOM 25).

Each face at the same font-size, measured from its own H and x, as a percentage of Cal Sans’s cap height.

Two numbers decide how a label sits once the font is in: how deep the descenders reach, and how far the line box sits off cap-center.

Descenders reach 31.9% of cap height below the baseline, so mixed-case labels still read as mixed case at 12px. And the line box is cap-centered to within 0.02 em: the space above the capitals matches the space below the baseline, so a label sits in the optical middle of a button, badge or input. No nudging, no one-pixel padding hack.

An open-source alternative to Inter, Roboto and SF Pro for product UI: same space, no resizing, free under the SIL Open Font License.

Every release is a different cut of the same source, sorted and ready in fonts/:

The full catalog (384 static styles, per-family subsets, Google Fonts packages) is in fonts/README.

Start with the character-alternative catalog: every set and variant, every letter it reshapes, drawn straight out of the finished font. Twenty stylistic sets and forty-two character variants ride in the full cuts; the lean cossui and Google Fonts builds subset them out to stay light.

python3 -m scripts

One command runs calBuild, a compiler built for this typeface alone. Using Cal Sans takes one line. Building it takes one command.

Cal Sans VF. The complete variable font, interpolated from the master drawings. calBuild starts by measuring the drawings themselves, taking true stem readings from the letters before a single style is compiled, then lifts the lowercase accents into the room taller ascenders create.

Cal Sans Flex. The morphing build. Powered by avar2, the axes coordinate on their own: shrink the size and the ascenders rise to meet it, for fine print that reads like it was set by hand. And a new HOI interpolation engine moves every point along curves instead of straight lines, so letterforms bend through the geometry as if redrawn, never recalculated. HOI fonts require multiple hidden avar2 axes: three helpers that GEOM drives, whose products make the curves.

Cal Sans Statics. All 384, cut from the variable font with the right letterforms already inside, ready for every platform that has never heard of an axis.

Setup, flags, and troubleshooting are in the build README.

Copyright (c) 2026, Mark Davis mark@wordmark.nyc, with typefaces "Cal Sans," "Cal Sans UI," "Cal Sans A11y," and "Cal Sans Geo." Commissioned by Peer Richelsen for Cal.com. This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1, available with a FAQ at: https://openfontlicense.org

This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. The full license lives in OFL.txt, and is also available with a FAQ at https://openfontlicense.org

This font repository structure is inspired by Unified Font Repository, modified for the Google Fonts workflow.