Roboto () is a

typeface family A typeface (or font family) is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, bold), slope (e.g., italic), width ...

developed by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

. The first typeface was created as the system font for its

Android Android most commonly refers to: *Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), a mobile operating system primarily developed by Google * Android TV, a operating system developed ...

operating system, and released in 2011 for Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich". The entire font family has been licensed under the

Apache license The Apache License is a permissive free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). It allows users to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software ...

. In 2014, Roboto was redesigned for Android 5.0 "Lollipop".

Usage

Roboto is the default system font on

, and since 2013, other Google services such as

Google Play Google Play, also known as the Google Play Store, Play Store, or sometimes the Android Store (and was formerly Android Market), is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certifie ...

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panorama, interactive panoramic views of streets (Google Street View, Street View ...

Google Images Google Images (previously Google Image Search) is a search engine owned by Gsuite that allows users to search the World Wide Web for images. It was introduced on July 12, 2001, due to a demand for pictures of the green Versace dress of Jennif ...

, and more. In 2017, Roboto was used on the LCD countdown clocks of the

New York City Subway The New York City Subway is a rapid transit system in New York City serving the New York City boroughs, boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. It is owned by the government of New York City and leased to the New York City Tr ...

's B Division lines. Roboto Bold is the default font in

Unreal Engine 4 Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) is the fourth version of Unreal Engine developed by Epic Games. UE4 began development in 2003 and was released in March 2014, with the first game using UE4 being released in April 2014. UE4 introduced support for Physically ...

, and in

Kodi Kodi may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * KODI, a radio station in Cody, Wyoming, USA * Kodi (film), ''Kodi'' (film), India, 2016 * Kodi, a dog in the 2004 film ''Balto III: Wings of Change'' Other uses * Kodi (software), an open sour ...

. Roboto Condensed is used to display Information on European versions of

Nintendo Switch The is a video game console developed by Nintendo and released worldwide in most regions on March 3, 2017. Released in the middle of the Eighth generation of video game consoles, eighth generation of home consoles, the Switch succeeded the ...

packaging, including physical releases of games. Utsav Network uses Roboto for its wordmark. The Indonesian news TV channel

iNews iNews, short for ''Indonesia News'', formerly named Sun TV and Sindo TV, is an Indonesian free-to-air Free-to-air (FTA) services are television (TV) and radio services broadcast in unencrypted form, allowing any person with the approp ...

also uses Roboto on its logo. Since October 2022,

Global News Global News is the news and Current affairs (news format), current affairs division of the Canadian Global Television Network. The network is owned by Corus Entertainment, which oversees all of the network's national news programming as well as ...

has also used Roboto in its on-air presentation, however the font is not used in main network presentation. The

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is the Earth, global intergovernmental organization established by the signing of the Charter of the United Nations, UN Charter on 26 June 1945 with the stated purpose of maintaining international peace and internationa ...

uses Roboto on its website and in official documents.

History

Android's previous system typeface,

Droid Sans Droid is a font family first released in 2007 and created by Ascender Corporation for use by the Open Handset Alliance platform Android (also its namesake) and licensed under the Apache License. The fonts are intended for use on the small scree ...

, was designed for the low-resolution displays of the very early Android devices, and did not display well in larger, higher-resolution screens of later models. It was decided that a more modern typeface, designed from scratch, was needed for the newer displays.

Early development

The new typeface, Roboto, was designed entirely in-house by Christian Robertson who previously had released an expanded

Ubuntu Titling Ubuntu Titling or Ubuntu-Title is a rounded geometric sans-serif font. It was created by Andy Fitzsimon for use with the Ubuntu operating system and its derivatives. It is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Prior to the ...

font through his personal type foundry Betatype. The font was officially made available for free download on January 12, 2012, on the newly launched Android Design website. Compared to the humanist sans-serif Droid Sans, Roboto belongs to the

neo-grotesque In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif (), gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than ...

genre of sans-serif typefaces. It includes Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold and Black weights with matching

oblique Oblique may refer to: * an alternative name for the character usually called a slash (punctuation) ( / ) *Oblique angle, in geometry * Oblique triangle, in geometry * Oblique lattice, in geometry * Oblique leaf base, a characteristic shape of the ...

styles rather than true italics. It also includes condensed styles in Light, Regular and Bold, also with matching

designs.

2014: "Material Design" redesign

In 2014,

Matias Duarte Matías is the Portuguese language, Portuguese version of Matthias. Matías is very popular in Latin America especially in Argentina. In List of territorial entities where German is an official language, German-speaking Europe it is most often writt ...

announced at

Google I/O Google I/O, or simply I/O, is an annual developer conference held by Google in Mountain View, California. The name "I/O" is taken from the number googol, with the "I" representing the first digit "1" in a googol and the "O" representing the s ...

that Roboto was significantly redesigned for Android 5.0 "Lollipop". Punctuation marks and the

tittles The tittle or superscript dot is the dot on top of lowercase ''i'' and ''j''. In English writing the tittle is a diacritic which only appears as part of these glyphs, but dot (diacritic), diacritic dots can appear over other letters in various l ...

in the lowercase "i" and "j" were changed from square to rounded, the leg part of the uppercase "R" were changed to curved to straight, the bottom surface of the top part of the number "1" points downwards instead of horizontal, the tail part of the numbers "6" and "9" have been slightly shortened (in resemblance to "

Trebuchet MS Trebuchet MS is a Sans-serif#Humanist, humanist sans-serif typeface that Vincent Connare designed for Microsoft, Microsoft Corporation in 1996. Trebuchet MS was the font used for the window titles in the Luna (theme), Windows XP default theme, su ...

"), the stem part of the number "7" becomes curved to straight, and the entire typeface was made “slightly wider and rounder” with many changes in details. The newly-redesigned version of Roboto is also offered in a wider range of font weights, adding Thin (100), Medium (500), and Black (900) alongside Light (300), Regular (400), and Bold (700). File:Roboto (typeface).svg, Sample text of Roboto in 2013 in various font weights and sizes, prior to the redesign for Android 5. Unlike now, the leg of the R has a curl, the same as in Helvetica.

Language support

Roboto supports

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

(partial) and

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...

scripts. On Android, the

Noto fonts Noto is a free font family comprising over 100 individual computer fonts, which are together designed to cover all the scripts encoded in the Unicode standard. , Noto covers around 1,000 languages and 162 writing systems. , Noto fonts cover a ...

are used for languages not supported by Roboto, including

Chinese Chinese may refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people identified with China, through nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **Han Chinese, East Asian ethnic group native to China. **'' Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic ...

(simplified and traditional),

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

Korean Korean may refer to: People and culture * Koreans, people from the Korean peninsula or of Korean descent * Korean culture * Korean language **Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Korean **Korean dialects **See also: North–South differences in t ...

, Thai and

Hindi Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...

(as of January 2014), and

Droid fonts Droid is a font family first released in 2007 and created by Ascender Corporation for use by the Open Handset Alliance platform Android (operating system), Android (also its namesake) and licensed under the Apache License. The fonts are intended ...

as of 2008.

Variations

Roboto Mono

Roboto Mono is a

monospace 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 ...

font based on Roboto. It is available in seven weights: thin, extra-light, light, regular, medium, semi-bold and bold, with oblique stylings for each weight.

Roboto Serif

Roboto Serif is a companion typeface with serifs designed by Greg Gazdowicz of

Commercial Type Commercial Type is a digital type foundry established in 2007 by type designers Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz. Its work includes typefaces for ''The Guardian'', such as the Guardian Egyptian series, and other retail and commissioned typefa ...

. It was debuted in 2022 to fill the serif niche.

Roboto Slab

Roboto Slab is a

slab serif In typography, a slab serif (also called ''mechanistic'', ''square serif'', ''antique'' or ''Egyptian'') typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular ( Rockwell), ...

font based on Roboto. It was introduced in March 2013, as the default font in Google's note-taking service

Google Keep Google Keep (formerly Google Notes and appears in app launcher as Keep Notes) is a note-taking service included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google. The service also includes: Google Docs, Google Sheets, G ...

. (The font was changed to the sans-serif Roboto in 2018.) It is available in four weights: thin, light, regular and bold. However, no oblique versions were released for it. In November 2019, the typeface was updated and added 5 new weights: Extra-Light, Medium, Semi-Bold, Extra-Bold and Black, and a variable font axis ranging from 100 to 900. It also was modified with some characteristics from the sans-serif Roboto and to slightly resemble most slab-serif typefaces, such as "R", "K", "k", "g", "C", "S", etc.

Roboto Flex

Released in 2022, Roboto Flex is the

variable font A variable font (VF) is a font file that is able to store a continuous range of design variants. An entire typeface (font family) can be stored in such a file, with an infinite number of fonts available to be sampled. The variable font technol ...

version of Roboto. Roboto Flex has 12 adjustable axes, including

optical size In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a ''typeface'', defined as the set of fonts that share an overall design. For instance, the typeface Bauer Bodoni (shown in the figure) includes fonts " Roman" (or "regula ...

. Notably, the static font version of Roboto does not have weights 200 (Extra Light), 600 (Semi Bold), and 800 (Extra Bold), which can be achieved by Roboto Flex via the weight axis. Roboto Flex supports Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic characters.

Potential inclusion as the new Android system font

Roboto Flex was still not used as the default system font in Android, potentially replacing classic Roboto. Meanwhile, Google started to use Google Sans Text as the default system font for Android system apps (e.g. Settings) in

Google Pixel Google Pixel is a brand of portable Consumer electronics, consumer electronic devices developed by Google that run either ChromeOS or the Pixel version of the Android (operating system), Android operating system. The main line of Pixel products ...

devices, following other Android OEMs who introduce custom fonts to their system apps. The Android source code has been updated to include the font as part of Android 14, though there are no official plans to switch the default system font from Roboto to Roboto Flex.

Heebo

Heebo is an extension of Roboto that includes Hebrew characters.

Inter

Inter was designed in 2016 by Rasmus Andersson who wanted a font that was easier to read on computer screens than Roboto while retaining its vertical proportions. Earlier versions of Inter (then "Interface" and "Inter UI") included glyphs and followed the vertical glyph metrics (ascender and descender) from Roboto, while Roboto glyphs were included as a fallback for characters which have not been (re-)designed in Inter. Inter changed its vertical glyph metrics since 2018, making it different from that of Roboto. Due to this condition, the typeface had to be released in two combined licenses: 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 Global, the ...

for original glyph designs for Inter and

Apache License The Apache License is a permissive free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). It allows users to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software ...

for the fallback Roboto glyphs and outlines. This exception was removed in 2020 after Roboto was re-licensed from Apache to OFL. Inter also has an experimental "Display" version, a font which has less letter spacing and has linear endings of letters. Another variant with similar purpose, Inter Tight, is specifically designed for

Google Workspace Google Workspace (formerly G Suite, formerly Google Apps) is a collection of cloud computing, Productivity software, productivity and Collaborative software, collaboration tools, software and products developed and marketed by Google. It con ...

and other applications that do not support control over

letter spacing Examples of headline letter spacing Letter spacing, character spacing or tracking is an optically consistent typographical adjustment to the space between letters to change the visual density of a line or block of text. Letter spacing is disti ...

. The latter variant shares the same glyph shapes as Inter, while the former contains redesigned glyphs which will be introduced in a future version of Inter. The Apple system font,

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

, is similar to the Inter font. However, the latter features a true italic whereas the former has an

oblique type Oblique type is a form of type that slants slightly to the right, used for the same purposes as italic type. Unlike italic type, however, it does not use different glyph shapes; it uses the same glyphs as roman type, except slanted. Oblique and i ...

GNOME A gnome () is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature. They are typically depict ...

uses Adwaita Sans which is a customized version of Inter.

Piboto

Piboto is a forked version of Roboto, including the original character styles as used before the 2014 redesign. It is specifically designed for and currently the system font of

Raspberry Pi OS Raspberry Pi OS is a Unix-like operating system developed for the Raspberry Pi line of single-board computers. Based on Debian, a Linux distribution, it is maintained by Raspberry Pi Holdings and optimized for Raspberry Pi hardware, with low memo ...

(then Raspbian) as part of their desktop UI redesign.

Reception

Google developed Roboto to be "modern, yet approachable" and "emotional," but the initial release (i.e., before the Android 5.0 redesign) received mixed reviews.

Joshua Topolsky Joshua Ryan Topolsky (born October 19, 1977) is an American technology journalist. He is also a record producer, and DJ under the stage name Joshua Ryan. Topolsky was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of technology news network ''The Verg ...

, Editor-In-Chief of technology news and media network ''

The Verge ''The Verge'' is an American Technology journalism, technology news website headquarters, headquartered in Lower Manhattan, New York City and operated by Vox Media. The website publishes news, feature stories, guidebooks, product reviews, cons ...

'', describes the typeface as "clean and modern, but not overly futuristic – not a science fiction font". However, typography commentator Stephen Coles of Typographica called the initial release "a Four-headed Frankenfont", describing it as a "hodgepodge" of different typographic styles which do not work well together. Coles later commented positively on the redesign and stated that it corrected many problems of the initial release.

References

External links

Roboto
download page at

Google Fonts Google Fonts (formerly known as Google Web Fonts) is a computer font and web font service owned by Google. This includes Free-software license, free and open source font families, an interactive web directory for browsing the library, and Applica ...

Roboto Condensed
download page at

Roboto Slab
download page at

Roboto Mono
download page at

Roboto Serif
download page at

{{Monospaced fonts Hebrew typefaces Neo-grotesque sans-serif typefaces Android (operating system) Typefaces and fonts introduced in 2011 Open-source typefaces Monospaced typefaces Unified serif and sans-serif typeface families Typefaces with text figures