Oswald font free download: the ZIP below holds a single font file with a variable weight axis and 883 glyphs, plus the OFL licence.
Yes — Oswald is free for commercial use, including in apps and client websites you ship
Oswald is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (OFL). You can use it in client work, logos, products you sell, apps and print, without paying and without asking permission.
Oswald reworks the classic ‘Alternate Gothic’ style — the tall, narrow sans of American newspaper and poster work. Vernon Adams redrew the characters specifically to fit the pixel grid of standard screens, then kept updating the family until 2014; Kalapi Gajjar and Cyreal continued it afterwards with more Latin and Cyrillic coverage. The condensed width is the whole point: it fits more headline into less horizontal space without dropping to a smaller size.
We read the license state from the font file itself rather than from a listing. The embedding permission flag (fsType) is 0 — Installable, the least restrictive value in the OpenType specification.
Quick facts
| Designer | Vernon Adams, Kalapi Gajjar, Cyreal |
| Added to Google Fonts | February 2012 |
| Version | Version 4.103;gftools[0.9.33.dev8+g029e19f] |
| License | SIL Open Font License 1.1 |
| Commercial use | Yes, no attribution required |
Embedding (fsType) | 0 — Installable, unrestricted |
| Variable font | Yes — 1 axis (Weight) |
| Weights | 6 named (200 ExtraLight → 700 Bold) |
| Glyphs | 883 |
| Characters covered | 850 |
| OpenType features | 12 |
| Vietnamese support | Yes, full |
| Download size | 91 KB — 1 font file + OFL.txt |
Download Oswald
What’s in the download
The download is a single ZIP containing 1 font file plus the licence:
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
| Oswald[wght].ttf | Variable upright — 1 axis: Weight |
OFL.txt travels with the files — keep it in the folder if you pass the font on to anyone else. Total download 91 KB.
The download includes the OFL license file. Keep it in the package if you redistribute the font.
Pairing suggestion. Prospect Display on The Asset Crate — a premium vintage all-caps display face for a period feel.
See it in real layouts: 6 fonts that pair with Oswald in Canva, including one pairing to avoid.
Choosing between two condensed headline faces? Our Anton pairing guide explains where Anton replaces Oswald and where it does not.
Internal link to our own coverage, not an external ad.
What the OFL license actually lets you do
You can:
- Use Oswald in commercial projects, including client work you bill for
- Use Oswald in a logo or brand identity, and trademark that logo
- Sell products that use Oswald — merchandise, packaging, book covers
- Embed Oswald in websites, apps, games, PDFs and ebooks
- Modify Oswald and redistribute your modified version
You cannot:
- Sell the font file on its own, outside a larger bundled product
- Distribute it without the OFL license file
- Release a modified version under a Reserved Font Name
No attribution is required in your design. The OFL only asks that the license file travels with the font files.
Inside the file: 883 glyphs and 850 characters
Oswald ships 883 glyphs covering 850 Unicode codepoints.
Vietnamese, and 13 other languages in full
Tested against the full alphabets of a reference set of languages, Oswald fully covers 14:
Vietnamese · Spanish · French · German · Portuguese · Italian · Polish · Czech · Turkish · Romanian · Hungarian · Dutch · Nordic (da/no/sv) · Cyrillic
Vietnamese is fully supported, including stacked diacritics such as ế, ộ, ữ and ỹ — worth checking before you commit, because many free families stop at Latin Extended-A and silently drop them.
Which Unicode blocks those 850 characters cover
| Block | Covered |
|---|---|
| Basic Latin | 95 / 96 |
| Latin-1 Supplement | 95 / 96 |
| Latin Extended-A | 128 / 128 |
| Latin Extended-B | 80 / 208 |
| IPA Extensions | 2 / 96 |
| Greek | 2 / 144 |
| Cyrillic | 222 / 256 |
OpenType features: 12 in the file
| Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
aalt | All alternates |
case | Case-sensitive forms |
ccmp | Glyph composition |
dlig | Discretionary ligatures |
frac | Fractions |
kern | Kerning |
liga | Standard ligatures |
locl | Localized letterforms |
mark | Diacritic positioning |
mkmk | Mark-to-mark positioning |
ordn | Ordinals |
sups | Superscript |
Variable axes: 1
- Weight (
wght): 200 to 700, continuous
Because this is a single variable file, every intermediate value is available. One file replaces the whole static weight set, which usually means a smaller total download than shipping three or four static cuts.
A tall x-height (0.578) — drawn to hold at small sizes
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Units per em | 1,000 |
| Ascender | 1,193 |
| Descender | -289 |
| Cap height ratio | 0.810 |
| x-height ratio | 0.578 |
An x-height ratio of 0.578 is high. Large lowercase letters make text look bigger at the same point size and hold up well at small sizes and on low-resolution screens — the trade is that long passages can feel dense.
Right for interfaces, wrong for long reading
Good fit: Headlines in tight columns, navigation, sports and news layouts, any headline that has to fit a fixed width.
Poor fit: Body copy, and centred settings where the narrow forms read as cramped.
Need something a free family cannot give you? Licensed families usually ship more weights, more alternates and a matched companion face:
Browse font families on Creative Market
Affiliate link — commission at no extra cost to you.
More free sans serif coverage
- Prospect Display — a premium vintage all-caps display face for a period feel
The license state and every technical figure on this page were read directly from the Oswald font binary — fsType embedding bits, glyph counts, character coverage, OpenType feature tables, variable-axis ranges and vertical metrics — not copied from a third-party listing. Last verified 23 August 2026 against version Version 4.103;gftools[0.9.33.dev8+g029e19f].
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