字Font of the week · · 2 min read
Bitter: a slab serif for reading on screen
Sol Matas's Bitter is a slab serif for body text on screen: a heavy Regular, a large x-height, variable weight from 100 to 900, and free to use under the OFL.
A slab serif built for screens, named exactly the way you feel after the first Lighthouse test of your own homepage.
Bitter was designed by Sol Matas and has been on Google Fonts since 2011. It was made for reading on screens; its first shapes were drawn straight onto the pixel grid. It is licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1: you may use it freely, commercially too.
What sets it apart
- The serifs are as thick as the strokes and end square. That keeps text steady, even at small sizes.
- Little contrast between thick and thin lines, and the Regular is heavier than usual. Nothing breaks up on a phone.
- Large x-height: the lowercase letters are tall, so text looks bigger at the same pixel size.
- Variable weight from 100 to 900, with a proper italic, small caps and tabular figures.
Nobody has ever seen
slide 4 of the carousel.
What it is good for
Bitter is a workhorse: body text on websites, blogs, newsletters, price lists, menus, forms. Tabular figures line prices up neatly, and small caps make section labels calm rather than loud. At 800 or 900 it handles headlines too.
Limits: it is too sober for posters that need a big gesture. The heavy Regular quickly looks dark in print, so use 300 or 350 there. There is no width axis.
14 pixels, light grey on white, 140 characters per line: that is not body text, that is an eye test.
Exercise for this week
Set your price list in Bitter 400 and switch on tabular figures (font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums). Then compare how quickly you find the most expensive item.
