Tilda Sаns

Tilda Sans is Tilda’s signature typeface. It is a variable typeface with an open license, which means that all platform users can apply it to their commercial projects for free.

Paratype: Dmitry Golub, Aleksandra Korolkova, Nickolai Nedashkovsky

Tilda: Nikita Obukhov, Boril Karaivanov, Yana Plushcheva

Technical characteristics

Font weights: Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, Extra Bold, Black combined in a variable typeface.

Languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and others.

The character set includes extended Latin and Cyrillic scripts, additional ligatures, alternates, subscripts and superscripts, fractions, proportional and monospaced versions of numbers and currencies, as well as a set of special-case forms for the easy handling of uppercase letters.

OpenType functions: kern, aalt, calt, case, ccmp, dlig, dnom, frac, liga, locl, numr, ordn, pnum, salt, ss01, sups, tnum.

Number of characters: 673

free variable
typeface

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Azerbaijani, Albanian, English, Asu, Afrikaans, Basque, Bashkir, Belarusian, Bemba, Bena, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Breton, Welsh, Welsh, Walloon, Hungarian, Upper Lusatian, Wolof, Vunjo, Galician, Ganda, Greenlandic, Gusi, Gaelic, Danish, Diola-Fonyi, West Frisian, Zulu, Ido, Inari-Sami, Indonesian, interlingua, Irish, Icelandic, Spanish, Italian, kabuverdianu, kaji, Kazakh, kalenjin, kamba, Catalan, Cologne, Quechua, kiga, kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Kyrgyz, Cornish, Corsican, xhosa, Kurdish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Lojban, Luo, Luhya, Luxembourgish, Mauritian Creole, Macedonian, Makonde, Makua-Meetto, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Maori, Machame, Meru, Mongolian, Mohauk, Manx, German, Dutch, Low German, Low German, Norwegian Bookmol, Nyanja, Nyankole, Nynorsk, Occitan, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Romansh, Rombo, Rwanda, Romanian, Rundi, Russian, Samburu, Sango, Sangu, Sardinian, Swazi, Cebuano, Northern Sami, Northern Ndebele, Northern Soto, Sedek, Sena, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Soga, Somalia, Swahili, Tajik, Taita, Tatar, Teso, Tswana, Tsonga, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Friulian, Croatian, Chechen, Czech, Chuvash, Shambhala, Swedish, Swiss German, Shona, Embu, Erzya, Esperanto, Estonian, Southern Ndebele, Southern Soto, Javanese

Standard Latin character set

Cyrillic

Tilda Sans Light

Online Store

Tilda Sans Medium

Tilda Sans Black

Blog

Landing page

Tilda Sans Light, Tilda Sans Regular, and Tilda Sans Black

A good design
is thought out to

the smallest

Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, format, design, and sequence of the various components of a book into a coherent whole. In the words of Jan Tschichold, "methods and rules upon which it is impossible to improve, have been developed over centuries. To produce perfect books, these rules have to be brought back to life and applied."

Tilda Sans Light

Tilda Sans Regular

Tilda Sans Medium

Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, format, design, and sequence of the various components of a book into a coherent whole. In the words of Jan Tschichold, "methods and rules upon which it is impossible to improve, have been developed over centuries. To produce perfect books, these rules have to be brought back to life and applied."

Tilda Sans Semibold

Tilda Sans Bold

detail

Tilda Sans is a geometric sans serif typeface for the web that features seven font weights—from Light to Black—combined into a variable typeface that ensures faster page loading and easier use in text boxes, headings, subheadings, and in the general interface.

7 Tilda Sans font weights

Tilda Sans Light
Tilda Sans Regular
Tilda Sans Medium
Tilda Sans Semibold
Tilda Sans Bold
Tilda Sans Extrabold
Tilda Sans Black

Nikita Obukhov

Tilda Founder

We set the bar high when creating Tilda Sans: We wanted to create an expressive typeface with a neutral character, which would work for any website—from an online flower store to a designer’s personal portfolio. At the same time, we wanted the typeface to become the voice of the platform, which by default will make a great design of any website created on Tilda.

Tilda offers affordable tools so that anyone can create their own designs online. We have beautiful blocks and templates, but there was one more ingredient missing to make a website look cool by default—our own font.

None of the existing fonts suited our needs. For example, when creating a page on Tilda, the default font you’ll use is Roboto. It’s okay, but it’s not quite up to par. What we needed was an expressive font that looks neat.

The closest references were German geometric sans serifs that were designed years ago but remain relevant today. We took them as a basis and created a new typeface—Tilda Sans—that meets the objectives of the platform.

Tilda Sans works well for both headings and body text, and also has a neutral character. These characteristics allow you to use the typeface for websites of different topics.

Tilda Sans on websites

Of course, we’ve also made good use of the advances in modern technology and made Tilda Sans variable. On the one hand, that reduces the weight of the font and increases the loading speed of the website, which is very important. Our font size is 75KB, compared to 300−400KB in the classic font format. On the other hand, it allows users to flexibly adjust the font’s weight on their own.

Variable incarnation of the typeface

Good design is honest

Tilda Sans Light

Tilda Sans Black

Once we’ve tested out the font on the platform, it can be used everywhere, not just on Tilda-based websites—without any fees or restrictions. We’ll eventually add it to the Google Fonts library, and I hope this font will become as popular as PT Sans once was.

It took us two attempts to create the typeface. The first one didn’t work—we thought that it would be enough to outsource the task and tidy it up once we had the finished typeface, without getting too involved. But it doesn’t work like that. So in the second run, I invited the secret advisor to the working group—my friend Boril Karaivanov from Bulgaria. Although he doesn’t call himself a font designer, he has deep expertise and experience in the field. And that worked. He helped us better understand what we wanted and corrected details that neither we nor Dima had seen. It’s very important to be included in the process and to acquire competence in the process.

That’s how Tilda Sans was born: a unique, high-quality, versatile, and free typeface that, in my opinion, the world has been missing.

Dmitry Golub

Tilda Sans typeface designer

It all started when Nikita Obukhov approached us at Paratype and invited us to work on a typeface for Tilda. The typeface had to have the characteristics of a geometric sans serif, like Erbar Grotesk, Elegant Grotesk, Neuzeit Grotesk, or Futura, but it had to be unique and more consistent in its design solutions.

Our art director Aleksandra Korolkova started working on Tilda Sans by searching for the idea of its plasticity, the nature of its curves.

According to the genre, the typeface has become proportional. By design, Tilda Sans is a moderately open geometric sans serif, echoing Roman lettering in capitals. We’ve added a few eye-catching and unique details, such as the legs and arms in 'KkR', the tail in the letter Q, and the proportions of the typeface as a whole.

Q Кk R

I started with one basic style—Regular. We maintained close contact with Nikita and the Tilda team during the design process, and this was that rare case of perfectionists being on both sides—I wanted to make the best possible typeface and the client wanted a product that fit the platform’s objectives. The typeface had to look great on any Tilda website, and it had to work equally well in both body text and headings.

In terms of form, the first thing we decided to do was to have equally open letters. German geometric sans serifs were created with reference to the German language, where the letter "c" is almost always followed by an "h" or a "k", so the letter "c" is open there, with vertical cuts, while the letter "e" is closed. We decided that we didn’t need these features.

CGSẞ

cegsзэ

In creating Tilda Sans, we carefully chose the height of the lowercase in bold. Once we had the Black master ready—the boldest lettering—I extrapolated the Light lettering and cleaned up its outlines.

Design is intelligence made visible

We paid a lot of attention to the composition of the characters—e.g., the extended Latin typeset is there for a reason.

The letter "ï" has a narrower dieresis, the ogonek (little tail) in the letter "ę" was drawn by hand, and the vertical caron in 'Ľľťť' has a regular shape, without repeating the design of the comma.

ï

ę

Ľľďť

I wanted to introduce more references to the era of the first geometric sans serifs. So I used the principle of linking the letters through a single upper arch in the "f" ligatures. In Tilda Sans, ligatures of the letter "f" work with the rest of the tall lowercase Latin letters.

To emphasize that Tilda Sans is Tilda’s signature font, Aleksandra Korolkova suggested adding an alternative two-part letter "a" with a tilde-like belly.

I made an alternate "u" letter out of my love for German geometric grotesque typefaces.

Speaking of supporting Cyrillic languages, I also made an extended Cyrillic case that includes Tatar, Bashkir, Udmurt, Kazakh, and other characters.

The font also contains the Ukrainian ligature "її", which solves Ukrainian typing issues.

її

We also made majuscule proportional numerals, which are in the font by default, along with monospaced, or tabular numerals. Tilda Sans also includes subscripts and superscripts and fractions.

Another interesting detail is that the font has alternative symbols for uppercase typing: Hyphens, dashes, guillemets (French-style quotation marks), and an "at" sign.

The font also features a set of currency signs and special characters.

In the end, the typeface turned out to be versatile: Friendly, moderately austere, perhaps even a little neutral, but with a distinctive character of its own.

Working on Tilda Sans was an interesting and long process, especially in terms of refining the outline, creating the character set, and aligning it in the lettering. In my opinion, this turned out to be an excellent typeface. Switch your websites to Tilda Sans—you definitely won’t regret it!

Tilda Sans is the standard typeface in the Tilda font library.

To use the typeface for your project, select it in the Site Settings