Inter Variable

Inter became the default interface font by solving the exact problem product teams have: text that has to stay readable at 11px in a dense table and still look intentional at 32px in a headline. Andersson drew it for screens, and the tall x-height is the visible evidence: lowercase letters stay open and distinct where a print-first grotesque closes up. The family is tuned for text below 60px, and the project added Inter Display in 2021 for larger sizes, with tighter letter spacing and tighter character widths, so the two faces together cover a full type scale.

The variable file is the production story. One upright file and one italic file carry a weight axis from 100 to 900 and an optical-size axis from 14 to 32, which replaces the old routine of shipping a dozen static weights and hoping the browser picks well. Nine weights in each style means the middle weights, where interfaces actually live, are drawn rather than interpolated, and the optical size adjusts the letterforms to the size they are set at instead of stretching one drawing across every size. The OpenType set is practical rather than decorative: contextual alternates that adjust punctuation to the shapes around it, a slashed zero for telling 0 from o in codes and serials, and tabular numbers that keep columns aligned in data tables.

Language coverage is the quiet headline. The Google Fonts record lists Latin, Latin Extended, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Greek Extended, and Vietnamese subsets, with a real italic in each style. A product shipping into Eastern Europe or Vietnam usually discovers at font-selection time that its fashionable free sans covers none of those scripts properly. Inter was drawn with that coverage in the family, and it is one of the few free interface faces where the italic is a designed companion rather than a slanted fake.

The license is the SIL Open Font License 1.1, recorded in the google/fonts repository where the family is filed under ofl and in the source repository at github.com/rsms/inter. Commercial use, embedding in apps and websites, modification, and redistribution with the copyright and license attached are all allowed; selling the font files on their own is the standing OFL prohibition. For a design team that means Inter can anchor a commercial product, travel in a client handoff, and sit in a design system repository with a paperwork burden of one license file. The project README still points users at the GitHub releases first, and that remains the safest source for the newest build; Google Fonts now carries 4.1 with italics, but it has lagged the source before.

The honest cost is sameness. Inter is the interface font of Figma, GitLab, Mozilla, NASA, and Unity, among others, and a brand set entirely in it will resemble a large share of the modern web. Distinctiveness has to come from colour, imagery, layout, or a contrasting partner face. The other limit is display size: standard Inter is tuned below 60px, so oversized headlines should use Inter Display or a dedicated display face rather than stretching the text face.

Bottom line: choose Inter when a product needs a single free sans that can run an interface, a data table, documentation, and a multilingual rollout without a license conversation. Pair it with a characterful display face for headlines and it covers most of a product team's type needs on its own. The comparison worth making before you commit is Manrope: warmer and more geometric, with Greek and Vietnamese of its own but no italic and a narrower weight story.