The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Free font
Francois One
A bold, condensed gothic display sans by Vernon Adams, reworked for the web and free under the SIL Open Font License since 2011.
About Francois One
Francois One is a bold condensed gothic by Vernon Adams, added to Google Fonts in May 2011 and licensed under the SIL Open Font License. Adams described it as a reworking of traditional sans serif gothic display forms: the earlier letterforms were digitised and reshaped for webfont use, with counters opened a touch, stems optimised for bold display setting in modern browsers, and slanted stem terminals added for visual interest. It comes in one static weight, Regular (400), covering Latin and Vietnamese.
Its narrow set and heavy stems make it a headline face: posters, hero banners, nav bars, labels and anything that needs to shout in little horizontal space. It is not built for long text, and with one weight it cannot carry a whole hierarchy alone, so pair it with a quieter text face. For teams eyeing Knockout, Champion Gothic or other American wood-type gothics, Francois One gives that compressed poster voice without a license fee.
- Designer
- Vernon Adams
- Released
- 2011
- Available at
- Google Fonts →
Display + body that work together
Headlines that read at a glance
The display sets the register; the body follows through. When both halves of a pair pull in the same direction, the design disappears and the words come forward.
Modern · Editorial Francois One + Source Serif 4
Pages that earn the read
Body type does the heavy lifting. Get it right and the reader never thinks about it; get it wrong and they feel it before they can name what is off.
Editorial · Modern DM Serif Display + Francois One