The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Free font
Nunito Sans
A free alternative to Airbnb Cereal.
About Nunito Sans
Nunito Sans is Vernon Adams's less-rounded sibling to Nunito, drawn explicitly for interface work with cleaner terminals, open counters, and a full variable weight range. The softly rounded warmth survives that sharpening, which is what gives it a friendly presence at display sizes and an unobtrusive one in paragraphs.
It is the most frequently cited free stand-in for Airbnb Cereal and the go-to substitute for gg sans, whose approachable chat-app character it reproduces almost exactly. It is also the closest overall match to Amazon Ember's friendly UI voice, and it covers Sofia Pro and Proxima Nova in body-text roles. Like TT Norms Pro it ships with full Cyrillic, which answers one of that family's selling points directly. Compared with Calibri it leans further into gentle warmth at the cost of businesslike restraint — worth weighing before it goes anywhere formal.
- Designer
- Vernon Adams
- Released
- 2016
- Available at
- Google Fonts →
Nunito Sans is also a free alternative to…
- Airbnb Cereal → The most frequently cited free Cereal stand-in — the same rounded warmth and open counters, in a well-built family with a full variable weight range. Friendly at display sizes, unobtrusive in paragraphs.
- Amazon Ember → The closest overall match — a well-balanced humanist sans with softly rounded warmth, open counters, and a wide weight range that mirrors Ember's friendly UI voice.
- Avenir → The less-rounded sibling of Nunito, drawn explicitly for UI. Cleaner terminals than Nunito proper — the right pick if you want Avenir's voice in interface body text without the soft-corners aesthetic.
- Calibri → Softly rounded and approachable — it leans further into the gentle warmth that made Calibri feel human, at the cost of some of its businesslike restraint.
- gg sans → The go-to free substitute — its rounded, friendly humanist forms and heavy weights capture gg sans's approachable chat-app character almost exactly.
- Homizio → A rounded-off geometric humanist with Homizio's open counters and gentle proportions, in a wide weight range with italics. Nunito Sans is softer at the terminals and a touch wider, so it reads a little friendlier in long text and a little less crisp in display sizes.
- Proxima Nova → Designed for UI work with screen-tuned proportions. Slightly softer than Proxima Nova's edges but close in geometric-humanist register, and one of the most-recommended substitutes for body-text use.
- Sofia Pro → Shares Sofia Pro's friendly, approachable warmth and softly geometric structure with a comparable x-height, making it a strong stand-in for body text and product interfaces.
- TT Norms Pro → A balanced, rounded geometric sans that captures TT Norms Pro's friendly-but-functional tone, and — like TT Norms — it ships with full Cyrillic support, one of the paid font's key selling points.
- Verdana → A well-rounded humanist sans with a generous x-height and slightly wide, friendly forms that echo Verdana's approachable on-screen warmth. Comfortable in both body text and interfaces.
- Shorai Sans → A geometric sans with softened terminals and an even, open rhythm, close in spirit to the Avenir Next lineage Shorai Sans was drawn to accompany. It carries the same friendly geometric texture in Latin text, though it offers no Japanese glyphs and its curves are rounder than Shorai's brush-tempered strokes.
Display + body that work together
Quiet type that does the work
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.
Modern · Editorial Nunito Sans + Crimson Pro
Headlines that read at a glance
A pairing is a relationship: one voice speaks first, the other answers, and the contrast between them sets the tone for the whole page.
Editorial · Modern DM Serif Display + Nunito Sans