New Making Google Sans Flex 2025

How seven design problems shaped Google’s iconic typeface — from inception to going open-source

Sometimes, design elements are birthed in flashes of inspiration — What if our interfaces were like paper? What if YouTube was a little more pink? — but not Google’s brand typeface.

Google Sans is the iconic typeface used across every Google product from Search to Wallet. It’s one of the most-served fonts on the internet, clocking in at some 120 billion font requests a month. It wasn’t born from a single brilliant sprint or creative spark. It evolved as the answer to a set of specific design problems, an answer that continued to expand and adapt to meet the shifting needs of users, designers, and developers. Now, after nearly a decade on Pixel phones and in Google apps, Google Sans is making its next big move: going open-source.

Read on for a brief history of Google’s beloved font, told through the design problems that shaped it.

The 2015 logo redesign was a smashing success. But even before its pixels were perfected, the team realized their work was only just beginning. Hundreds of product lockups — the fixed arrangement of the logo paired with each product name — had to be updated to match.

“The majority of how people experience the Google brand is through typography, whether that’s in a product, marketing, or content. We had the Google logo and identity framework, but we were missing that connective tissue,” explains Ken Frederick, former UX Lead for Google’s Brand Studio.

Designers considered treating each lockup as a unique logo, but the sheer volume of work made this approach unscalable. So, a new typeface was born based on the clean geometric forms of the new logo: Product Sans. The font’s repeating geometric shapes and tightly spaced characters made it perfectly suited for big product names at big sizes. Many Google apps still use these lockups today.

If a designer sees a gorgeous typeface, they’ll want to use it. Team members in Marketing loved the look of Product Sans and asked for it to be expanded for use in advertising. But in practice, the typeface fell short when you only had a couple of seconds to catch consumers’ eyes. At the same time, product designers started playing around with using Product Sans in interfaces. The results? Not great. Product Sans wasn’t optimal for lengthy passages of text, or at the smaller text sizes used on phones and tablets. Google’s designers needed a more versatile brand typeface. Enter: Google Sans.

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Source: HackerNews