Arsenal

Arsenal is a humanist sans by Andrij Shevchenko, published on Google Fonts in 2017, and the free face most consistently cited as the closest available match for Optima. It's built on geometric proportions with humanist detailing worked into them: a clean, modern skeleton carrying just enough calligraphic inflection to keep it from reading as pure geometry. The result stays elegant at display sizes without tipping into decoration, and remains functional enough to hold a line of text.

Optima is what it's for. Arsenal captures the register that makes Optima recognizable — formal without serifs, elegant yet plainly useful — and delivers it in a family that can be served openly, with no license to negotiate. It suits the same assignments: cultural and institutional identity, editorial headers, invitations, packaging — the places where a serif reads too traditional and a grotesque too cold.