All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Adobe has released a new open source font family by the name of Source Sans Pro.
You can check out and download the various font weights and styles in both OTF and TTF formats from Adobe. There's a PDF glyph sample available as well. Both Adobe Typekit and Google Web Fonts are serving up hosted copies, if you'd like an easy way to use Source Sans Pro on your website.
Source Sans Pro makes a nice headline font on the web, with a nod to classic News Gothic headline fonts of the early 20th century.
Adobe typeface designer Paul D. Hunt created Source Sans Pro. "I was drawn to the forms of the American Type Founders’ gothics designed by Morris Fuller Benton.... I have always been impressed by the forms of his News Gothic and Franklin Gothic," writes Hunt on the Adobe Type Blog. The goal behind Source Sans Pro was to create a font that's "both legible in short UI labels, as well as being comfortable to read in longer passages of text on screen and in print."
Adobe's plan is to use the new font in its open source applications, and indeed Source Sans Pro is already part of the WebKit-based code editor, Brackets. An earlier incarnation was used in the Strobe Media Playback framework. (in Strobe, Source Sans Pro is known as Playback Sans).
In addition to the font itself, Adobe is releasing the underlying source materials so that anyone who'd like to can modify Source Sans Pro to suit their whims. Source Sans Pro is available under the OSI-approved SIL Open Font License.
