Fira Sans is a

humanist Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and agency of human beings. It considers human beings the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry. The meaning of the term "humani ...

sans-serif

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands ...

Erik Spiekermann Erik Spiekermann (born 30 May 1947 in Stadthagen, Lower Saxony) is a German typographer, designer and writer. He is an honorary professor at the University of the Arts Bremen and ArtCenter College of Design. Biography Spiekermann studied art hi ...

, Ralph du Carrois, Anja Meiners, Botio Nikoltchev of Carrois Type Design and Patryk Adamczyk of

Mozilla Corporation The Mozilla Corporation (stylized as moz://a) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of op ...

. Originally commissioned by

Telefónica Telefónica, S.A. () is a Spanish Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications company headquartered in Madrid, Spain. It is List of telephone operating companies, one of the largest telephone operators and List of mobile network ...

and

as part of the joint effort during the development of

Firefox OS Firefox OS (project name: ''Boot to Gecko'', also known as ''B2G'') is a discontinued open-source operating system made for smartphones, tablet computers, smart TVs, and dongles designed by Mozilla and external contributors. It is based on the ...

. It is a slightly wider and calmer adaptation of Spiekermann's typeface ''

Meta Meta (from the Greek μετά, '' meta'', meaning "after" or "beyond") is a prefix meaning "more comprehensive" or "transcending". In modern nomenclature, ''meta''- can also serve as a prefix meaning self-referential, as a field of study or ende ...

'', which was used at Mozilla's brand typeface at the time but optimized for legibility on (small) screens. With the name Fira, Mozilla wanted to communicate the concepts of fire, light and joy but in a language agnostic way to signal the project's global nature. Fira was released in 2013 initially under the Apache License and later reissued under the

SIL Open Font License The SIL Open Font License (or OFL in short) is one of the major open font licenses, which allows embedding, or "bundling", of the font in commercially sold products. OFL is a free and open source license. It was created by SIL Internationa ...

. In its initial 2013 release, Fira Sans was available in four weights with corresponding

italics In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, italics normally slant slightly to the right. Italics are a way to emphasise key points in a printed te ...

: light, regular, medium, and bold. In May 2014, the number of weights was increased to 16. In 2015, Mozilla added a condensed style. The family has a large character set including

text figures Text figures (also known as non-lining, lowercase, old style, ranging, hanging, medieval, billing, or antique figures or numerals) are numerals designed with varying heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text, hence the ...

and

small caps In typography, small caps (short for "small capitals") are characters typeset with glyphs that resemble uppercase letters (capitals) but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding lowercase letters or text figures. This is technica ...

. Fira Sans is the font of choice for the New Zealand

Government A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government ...

and the

of Iceland.

Fira Mono

Fira Sans is accompanied by a

monospaced A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with variable-width fonts, where the letters and spaci ...

variant called Fira Mono, available in regular, medium, and bold.

Fira Code

Fira Code is an extension of the Fira Mono font containing a set of ligatures for common programming multi-character combinations. Considered one of the best programming fonts, it is available in regular, medium, bold and light, and as a variable weight font.

Fira Go

In March 2018, a multilingual extension named FiraGo (stylised as FiraGO) was released. It has

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walte ...

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the a ...

, Georgian,

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

and Thai letters in addition to Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets in the typeface. It was commissioned by

Here Technologies Here Technologies (stylised and trading as HERE and here) is an American-Dutch multinational group dealing with mapping, location data and related automotive services to individuals and companies. It is majority-owned by a consortium (an a ...

. FiraGo was released as a separate product, and will be the main font family in the group. All future updates to Fira Sans will be based on FiraGo and as of 2018, all Fira families are issued b
bBox Type
which is headed by Ralph du Carrois and Anja Meiners.

Fira Math

Released in 2019, Fira Math is a sans-serif font with Unicode math support and is developed by Stone Zeng.

References

Patryk Adamczyk, “Introducing Feura Sans, a more legible font for mobile”, ''Mozilla UX Quarterly'', Q2 2013
PDF
) �

��, ''Typografie.info'', 20 July 2013 Erik Spiekermann, �
Fira specimen uploaded
��, ''Spiekerblog'', 30 July 2013 �
Try Out Fira Sans: a Free, Open Source Typeface Commissioned by Mozilla
��, ''Do not Lick'', 23 May 2014

External links

* * *
Fira Sans and Mono
at bBox Type
FiraGo
at bBox Type
Fira Sans
on

Google Fonts Google Fonts (formerly known as Google Web Fonts) is a computer font and web font service owned by Google. This includes free and open source font families, an interactive web directory for browsing the library, and APIs for using the fonts via ...

Fira Sans Condensed
on

Fira Sans Extra Condensed
on

Fira Mono
on

{{Free software typefaces Humanist sans-serif typefaces Free software Unicode typefaces Firefox OS Typefaces with text figures Typefaces designed by Erik Spiekermann Monospaced typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 2013 IPA typefaces