Reading should cost less effort.
A geometric sans serif in four weights, drawn so accessibility is built into the family itself. Designed for comfortable, low-ambiguity reading, with features that may particularly benefit readers with dyslexia or low vision.
The headline is editable. Type your own words into it.
Designed for reading
Some fonts add avoidable visual ambiguity to reading. Listerdale Sans distinguishes commonly confused characters, keeps punctuation visible and gives words slightly more space — without looking like a specialist typeface.
One, lowercase l and capital I each take a different shape, so codes and references read without guesswork.
The q carries a tail on its descender, so p and q are no longer mirror twins.
An open, uncrossed w. One less unfamiliar shape to decode.
The d runs narrower than the b, quietly breaking the last mirror pair. Full stops and commas are enlarged so sentence boundaries stay visible, and the lowercase runs slightly taller for easier recognition at small sizes.
Lining figures align steadily in tables and hold their own beside capitals.
room to breathe and read
The same words with and without the extra spacing: every letter sits 2.4% of an em further apart and word spaces run 27% wider. Deliberately gentle — in the direction the reading research points, without ever looking spaced out. Add more with CSS or your app's settings; the font won't fight you.
Stroke weight settles gently toward the baseline, anchoring each letter. An intentional design feature of the text cut, not an established reading intervention.
Try it
Set your own text in any weight.
Four weights
Text and Display
Same letterforms, same widths, two finishes. The text cut grades stroke weight gently toward the baseline for comfortable reading; Display keeps strokes crisp and even for large sizes. Swapping between them never reflows a line.
Text cut - body copy and everything you read. Look at the stroke bottoms: slightly heavier, anchoring each letter.
Display - headings, titles and anything above about 20pt. Even strokes, clean at any scale. This page's own headings are set in it.
Why we made it
Our work runs on documents: proposals, reports, slide decks. If one reader in ten finds them harder to read than they should be, that is a communication problem, and we sit inside it. We wanted a typeface that removed the friction without looking like an aid. The ones that existed either announced themselves loudly or came with licence fees, so we drew our own and decided it should be free. If it makes one report easier for someone to read, releasing it was worth the effort.
Free. Properly free.
Eight fonts in two optical cuts (a text cut for reading, a Display cut for headings), a specimen and the licence in one download. Use it, embed it and share it, commercially or otherwise. If you pass the fonts on, keep the licence file and copyright notice with them: they carry the attribution, and redistribution without them is not permitted. The font files may not be sold. A credit or link back when you use it publicly is appreciated, never required. Matching PowerPoint, Word and LibreOffice templates are available separately; install the fonts first.
Download Listerdale Sans Templates