What is the Sweet Sans™ font?

The engraver’s sans serif—strikingly similar to drafting alphabets of the early 1900s—has been one of the most widely used stationer’s lettering styles since about 1900. Its open, simple forms offer legibility at very small sizes. While there are digital fonts based on this style (such as Burin Sans™ and Sackers Gothic™, among others), few offer the range of styles and weights possible, with the versatility designers perhaps expect from digital type families. Sweet Sans fills that void. More… The family is based on antique engraver’s lettering templates called “masterplates.” Professional stationers use a pantograph to manually transfer letters from these masterplates to a piece of copper or steel that is then etched to serve as a plate or die. This demanding technique is rare today given that most engravers now use a photographic process to make plates, where just about any font will do. But the lettering styles engravers popularized during the first half of the twentieth century—especially the engraver’s sans—are still quite familiar and appealing. Referencing various masterplates—which typically offer the alphabet, figures, an ampersand, and little else—Mark van Bronkhorst has drawn a comprehensive toolkit of nine weights, each offering upper- and lowercase forms, small caps, true italics, arbitrary fractions, and various figure sets designed to harmonize with text, small caps, and all-caps. The fonts are available as basic, Standard character sets, and as Pro character sets offering a variety of typographic features and full support for Western and Central European languages. Though rich in history, Sweet Sans is made for contemporary use. It is a handsome and functional tribute to the spirit of unsung craftsmanship. Burin Sans and Sackers Gothic are trademarks of Monotype Imaging.

Sweet Sans™ Font families

The Sweet Sans™ includes the following font families:

• Sweet Sans ExtraLight
• Sweet Sans ExtraLight Small Caps
• Sweet Sans ExtraLight Italic
• Sweet Sans ExtraLight Italic Small Caps
• Sweet Sans Light
• Sweet Sans Light Small Caps
• Sweet Sans LightItalic
• Sweet Sans Light Italic Small Caps
• Sweet Sans
• Sweet Sans Small Caps
• Sweet Sans Italic
• Sweet Sans Italic Small Caps
• Sweet Sans Medium
• Sweet Sans Medium Small Caps
• Sweet Sans Medium Italic
• Sweet Sans Medium Italic Small Caps
• Sweet Sans Bold
• Sweet Sans Bold Small Caps
• Sweet Sans Bold Italic
• Sweet Sans Bold Italic Small Caps
• Sweet Sans Heavy
• Sweet Sans Heavy Small Caps
• Sweet Sans Heavy Italic
• Sweet Sans Heavy Italic Small Caps

Sweet Sans™ Preview

Here is a preview of how Sweet Sans™ will look. For more previews using your own text as an example, click here.