Fonts and typography
The words we choose are an important part of our brand voice, but so is the way those words look. The way our words look is established by the fonts that we use and the way that we use them, also known as typography. The Red Hat® font family was designed for the Red Hat brand by type designer Jeremy Mickel in collaboration with our design teams.
In our font family, each character is made up of perfect circles and straight, even lines. The effect is a geometric, rational, and engineered font with human touches inspired by our brand’s history. The open feeling of the individual letters balances the tight spacing in between letters.
Our fonts are open licensed under the SIL International license and are available for anyone to download and use. To use our fonts, you can: access them preloaded in templates, download and install them from GitHub, use them as web type, add them to your Google Fonts options, or find them pre-installed on Red Hat-issued computers.
Download our Red Hat fonts to create Red Hat materials.
Do not use other fonts for Red Hat materials.
Red Hat fonts
Red Hat Display
Red Hat Display is used in headlines and to make big statements. Because Red Hat Display is intended for large sizes, it has more of our brand personality and voice, with even strokes, tight spacing, and tall, open letterforms. If you do not know which font to use, default to Red Hat Display.
Red Hat Text
Red Hat Text takes all of the personality from Red Hat Display and optimizes it for more demanding applications. It is easy to read in paragraphs and very small sizes, like in a whitepaper or a tooltip in an interface.
To increase readability at small sizes, Red Hat Text has more height difference between the upper- and lowercase letters, more space between narrower characters, and more variation in the line weight.
Red Hat Mono
Red Hat Mono is our monospaced font that was created to distinguish code from natural-language text. It should only be used when demonstrating code snippets in our communications and specifications, or as a stylistic approach for a more technical audience, like the Red Hat Developer Program or Command Line Heroes.
Global type
Red Hat Display and Red Hat Text support the extended Latin character set and work for most European languages. For other languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Cyrillic, use the Noto Sans font family.
Noto is an open licensed font family from Google that was developed to support all languages without the little boxes—known as tofu—that show up when a font does not support a character. The simple, clean design makes it a good counterpart to the Red Hat type family.
What about variable fonts?
The variable version of our fonts includes weight as a variable option, and are best used on web properties to decrease load times. When using variable fonts, stick to the named weights (regular, bold, etc.) for consistency across applications. If your desktop app doesn’t support variable fonts, use the traditional version instead.
Key principles of typography at Red Hat
Whether you’re using type to simply convey information or are using it as an expressive design element, apply these principles to ensure that your typography looks and feels like Red Hat.
Use sentence case
We use sentence case—not all caps or title case—in Red Hat materials, including headlines. Type in all caps implies that we are yelling or overly aggressive. Sentence case is more authentic, friendly, and realistic, and it lets capitalized words stand out. For guidance on capitalizing words, review the Red Hat corporate style guide.
Always use sentence case text for Red Hat materials, even for headlines. We write the way that real people talk, and that extends to how we use our fonts.
Avoid using title case and never use all caps. It doesn’t fit our brand personality and it feels too aggressive.
Use one kind of emphasis
When differentiating words in context, we either bold, italicize, or change text to an approved brand color, but we use only 1 style at a time. We bold for emphasis when writing digital copy and italicize when writing collateral. When creating presentations, ad copy, and social graphics, we can use any of the 3 but only 1 treatment at a time.
Use one treatment to create hierarchy or emphasis. Choose the most important word or phrase to emphasize.
Do not use more than one type of emphasis at a time. It creates confusion and makes it difficult for the audience to decide what is most important.
Allow for white space
The empty space around the elements of any design is known as white space (even if it's not actually the color white). Using white space effectively can highlight our message and help communicate some of the key attributes of our brand personality.
Leaving plenty of white space makes our brand feel open and inviting, and focusing on 1 or 2 key messages instead of filling every space makes our brand feel confident and bold.
Use a lot of white space and minimal text, and leave a margin.
Do not crowd a small space with a lot of text or eliminate a margin to create space for text.
Functional type
Functional type conveys information and is often found in presentations, letterheads, templates, and collateral.
Functional type is readable, legible, and straightforward. Its letters are not edited or moved around. It can be small and informative, like a paragraph explaining technical information; and it can be bold and assertive, like a big headline.
Expressive type
Type can be more than informational—it can also be used to grab attention, emphasize an idea, or add to the literal meaning of words. Expressive typography uses stylized type in a way that is more like image than text. It evokes a feeling or emotion in a way that a block of type does not.
Explore the possibilities, but keep in mind that expressive type can make translation, editing, and customization more complicated.
Typography in use
Our presentation templates use Red Hat Display and Red Hat Text as functional type to clearly communicate to our customers, partners, and associates while looking and feeling like Red Hat.
We use Red Hat Mono in marketing materials when we’re talking about code or when the design is targeted towards a technical audience.
Using Red Hat fonts on our web properties allows for consistency and extends our brand presence. Learn more about how to use type on the web.
It’s important to consider how people with different abilities perceive text in your asset. Consider size, spacing, emphasis for hierarchy, and legibility. Learn more about accessibility at Red Hat.
Our font contributions
Open design is important at Red Hat because our approach to open source extends beyond acquiring and liberating software. We hope that if we make and share something that is useful to us, it can be useful to someone else as well. This is why we created fonts for everyone to use, learn from, and improve upon. Keep in mind that we do not use these open source fonts in Red Hat-branded materials.
Liberation was created in 2007 to ease formatting issues when documents moved between open and proprietary office tools. It is built in 4 TrueType font families, including Liberation Sans, Liberation Sans Narrow, Liberation Serif, and Liberation Mono.
Overpass was created in 2016 and has expanded several times since then. Based on Highway Gothic, the font was originally used on U.S. highway signs and features 20 styles, including thin, light, light italic, regular, regular italic, semi-bold, bold, extra bold, and black.
We created and open sourced a family of handwriting fonts for the Because we had to article series in 2018. It includes 6 styles, each representing the women in technology highlighted in the articles.
