The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Free font
Barlow
A free alternative to DIN.
About Barlow
Barlow is Jeremy Tribby's 2017 grotesque, a slightly rounded low-contrast sans drawn from California public signage — highway signs, buses, license plates. That pedigree shows in narrow, evenly stroked letterforms with an engineered, public-information feel and a West Coast softness at the corners. The family runs to 54 styles across three widths and nine weights with italics, including full Condensed and Semi Condensed companions.
The signage origin makes it a direct parallel to DIN, which came out of German road signs, and to Interstate — the same civic-utilitarian brief, a softer finish, and a width system that mirrors Interstate's own. Breadth is the other argument. Three widths make Barlow the best free approximation of Sharp Grotesk's multi-width range, and the condensed cuts cover the space-efficient side of Netflix Sans and the automotive utility of Porsche Next.
- Designer
- Jeremy Tribby
- Released
- 2017
- Available at
- Google Fonts →
- Featured on
- 5 paid font pages
Barlow is also a free alternative to…
- DIN → Inspired by California's highway signage — a deliberate parallel to DIN's origins in German road signs. Barlow's narrower letters and even strokes give it the same engineered, public-information feel, with a comprehensive weight and width range.
- Interstate → A slightly rounded grotesque drawn from California public signage — highway signs, buses, license plates — giving it the same civic-utilitarian pedigree as Interstate with a softer, West Coast finish. Comes in three widths, mirroring Interstate's width system.
- Netflix Sans → A slightly rounded low-contrast grotesque with full Condensed and Semi Condensed companion families — a practical match for Netflix Sans's utilitarian, space-efficient side.
- Porsche Next → A slightly rounded low-contrast grotesque inspired by California public signage and license plates — it carries the same automotive utility, and its 54 styles cover full corporate use.
- Sharp Grotesk → A low-contrast grotesk superfamily shipping in three widths and nine weights with italics — the best free approximation of Sharp Grotesk's multi-width breadth, released the same year and equally suited to display and text.
Display + body that work together
The shape of a working week
Two thousand years of letterforms boil down to a handful of decisions — width, weight, proportion. Pick a pair you trust, and let the rest take care of itself.
Modern · Editorial Barlow + Crimson Pro
Pages that earn the read
Crisp, even strokes give the display its punch. Quiet serifs underneath stay readable across thousands of words — used together by editors at the kind of paper that still prints corrections.
Editorial · Modern DM Serif Display + Barlow