2021

2025

2020

2019

2018

2022

2023

2024

2026

Joancarles Casasin

Elena Novoselova

Pooja Saxena

Roxane Gataud

Gerry Leonidas

Kiril Zlatkov

Individual Credits

Lead Designer

Design Company

https://www.type-together.com/literata-font

Profile Website

Project Website

Client

Irene Vlachou (Greek), Vera Evstafieva (Cyrillic)

Design Team

Video (direct link)

Literata is a serif screen font family — an old soul wrapped in the modern trappings of advanced code. Digital text represents one of the most important challenges faced by designers and developers today, so Literata 3 was conceived for intensive editorial use, especially on screens of all sorts. Its main potential is in digital publishing, whether on the web, electronic press, or mobile applications. Originally designed as the custom typeface for all Google Play Books, it is available for free as a cutting-edge variable font.

Literata 3 is no small upgrade. It is a full redesign within new technological bounds to handle any editorial challenge. After the original Literata’s release and a notable expansion to the family, we created version three from the ground up within the variable font design space.

To set that design space, the extremes had to be decided first; think of a grid with specially designed font “masters” lining the edges. Once completed, this grid-style design space controls how each character looks depending on how close it is to each master. And the OpenType variable font files allow users to access endless styles within the design space, like choosing any weight variation between the extra-light and the light, which cannot be done with normal font families.

Literata variable has only two font files (roman and italic), but the compression technology allows it to contain more than 15 times the styles as the regular OTF files. The core part of Literata roman excels at text typesetting for continuous reading, and the new headline and caption styles make this family a complete digital publishing toolbox. Literata’s upright italic design is uncommon for screen fonts, but addresses inherent limitations of the square pixel grid, solving several problems simultaneously. These advances are only possible using the new variable font format.

Literata 3 is published with an OpenFont License (OFL) so it’s free to own and use — no strings attached! This wide-ranging family of two variable fonts supports Greek, Cyrillic, PinYin, and Vietnamese. Download it, experiment with it, and use it to your heart’s content. Literata 3 is the culmination of years of research, technological advances, and a vision to create a type family robust enough to comfortably read a full novel on any screen and at any text size. It’s the magic only available through maturation.

Gold Winner in Typography for Graphic Design

Literata