Virtua Grotesk is a geometric grotesk with 16-unit chamfered corners — every sharp junction gets a 45-degree bevel. Strokes are monolinear, with no thick–thin contrast; round forms use smooth curves with generous counters. The result is a retro-futurist technical character drawn with modern precision.
Every measurement is a power of two or a short sum of them: 1024 units per em, 768 cap height, 576 x-height, 16-unit chamfers on a 2-unit grid. Weight gain across the axis works by counter reduction — outer contours often stay identical between Regular and Bold while the inner counter shrinks inward.
Virtua Grotesk is also a machine-learning experiment: a typeface designed from the first point to be training data, and the demo font for an AI type-production pipeline. The full story is in the essay Grid System as Dataset. Sources, tooling and build system are open on GitHub.
| Axis | Tag | Min | Default | Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weight | wght | 400 | 400 | 700 |
| Font | Format | Web file size |
|---|---|---|
| Virtua Grotesk Variable | WOFF2 | 34 kb |
Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Galician, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Kurdish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Māori, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Sámi, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Welsh, Zulu — with Arabic-script support in progress for Arabic, Persian and Urdu.
Virtua Grotesk is free and open source under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 — use it, ship it, modify it. Sources are UFO + designspace; builds are reproducible with the repo's Makefile. A Google Fonts release is in preparation.
Download from GitHub