designbriefs
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Open source

The most valuable software in the world, given away.

7
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8:46
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All briefs7
10:42

Erik Spiekermann

Typography is not about taste — it’s about infrastructure, and Spiekermann built it.
6:38

Inter (typeface)

Inter isn’t prettier than Roboto—it’s legible where Roboto fails, and that’s why it replaced it.
4:16

Lato (typeface)

Łukasz Dziedzic

Lato is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Łukasz Dziedzic and released in 2010. It was commissioned by a Polish bank, then cancelled and published under the Open Font License. As of August 2018, it appeared on over 9.6 million websites and ranked third on Google Fonts by usage. It has been applied in physical media including election billboards and information signs, and adopted by Save the Children for its logotype since 2022.

6:40

Source Sans

A pragmatic open-source sans-serif built to fix News Gothic’s uneven colour — not to reinvent typography.
11:34

IBM Plex

IBM Design · 2017

IBM Plex is a corporate typeface designed to replace Helvetica across IBM’s global communications. Its rationale is financial and ideological: open-source licensing eliminates licence fees; typographic decisions reject expressive or historical categories in favour of functional clarity. It delivers a coherent, documented system — but only within the narrow frame of IBM’s internal brand requirements.

10:08

Open Sans

Steve Matteson · 2010

Open Sans is a functional, open-source humanist sans-serif designed by Steve Matteson for Google in 2011. It prioritises screen legibility through wide apertures and large x-height, supports Latin, Greek, Cyrillic (897 glyphs), gained Hebrew and variable font support in 2021, and manifests publicly via a Google Easter egg. It does not extend beyond those scripts. Its influence lies in normalising open-source, cross-platform typography — not aesthetic innovation.

11:22

Roboto

Christian Robertson · 2011

Roboto is a functional, open, and pervasive sans-serif typeface family designed by Christian Robertson for Google in 2011. It succeeded by solving a narrow problem well — legibility on early Android screens — then scaled through permissive licensing and platform integration.