You'll have seen Google Sans even if you didn't know it. The Google brand typeface is used across all of the company's marketing and UI design and in products from Search to Wallet.
With around 120 billion font requests a month, it’s one of the most-served fonts on the internet. But nobody outside of Google could use it – until now. The tech giant has made Google Sans and its variations open source, allowing anyone to download them from its library of free fonts (see our pick of the best Google fonts).
First developed around a decade ago, Google Sans has evolved over the years to meet changing needs.
It grew out of Product Sans, which was based on the clean geometry of the Google logo to allow the efficient creation of product logo lockups. But that typeface didn't translate well to marketing and advertising assets.
Colophon Foundry was tasked with developing Google Sans as a more versatile alternative. The type designers optimised character shapes, terminals, ascenders, descenders, x-heights and stroke contrasts to make the fonts suitable for longer blocks of text as well as for small text sizes on phones and tablets.
Google Sans Text followed in 2020 to work at smaller sizes for paragraphs and interface text. There's also Google Sans Mono, which in 2025 evolved into Google Sans Code. Developed by Universal Thirst , that's the typeface now used to display code in Gemini.
The latest addition to the family is Google Sans Flex. This was developed with variable font technology at Font Bureau and Pathfinders to allow precise control over weight, width, optical size, slant, grade and roundedness. It also provides support for non-Latin scripts like Arabic, Chinese and Thai.
Google says it's releasing its brand font into the wild to avoid fragmentation and allow developers and designers to “bridge the visual gap between first-party and third-party apps”.
It notes that until now, you might see Google Sans in Gmail, then open WhatsApp and see Roboto or a device-specific font. It sees that as a “persistent, if subtle, point of friction”.
This fragmented visual language, unlike the unified font experiences on some other platforms, has prevented a seamless digital experience. “It just doesn’t feel as nice,” stresses Visual Designer Megan Lynch. “On a subconscious level it impacts the experience.”
By making Google Sans open source, it hopes to allow UI designers in particular to craft a more unified experience across devices and platforms with clear, comfortable interface designs.
You can download Google Sans from Google Fonts. For more options, see our pick of the best free fonts.
