Red Hat Font

Red Hat's official repository credits Jeremy Mickel of MCKL with designing the typeface, originally commissioned by Paula Scher and Pentagram for the company's identity. The project describes a superfamily with Display, Text and Mono branches. Its geometric sans serif direction draws on American designs including Tempo and Highway Gothic.

Read the publisher’s family page for the source account and the edition currently offered. Keep a family name distinct from its particular release, width or optical branch.

Display uses close spacing and a large lowercase height for headings, while Text has more generous spacing, narrower proportions and adjusted joins for smaller reading settings. Mono is a separate fixed-width branch. These are role-specific designs, not just differently named sizes of one file.

Use the original publisher specimen to inspect those features. An alternative can share a broad role without having the same letter shapes, metrics or character coverage.

Compare a heading in Display with a paragraph in Text and an aligned code sample in Mono. Keep the wording and output size realistic instead of treating a display sample as proof of paragraph performance. Review the original files and license notices when downloading or adapting the family.

For independent comparisons, try Inter and Source Sans 3. Use the same wording and approximate output size. The related style guide provides broader design context.

Use Red Hat / MCKL to try the original and investigate the files, styles and terms for your intended workflow. This site does not distribute or serve Red Hat font software.

The editable alternatives here have their own source profiles and included licenses. For the difference between a font file and copied characters, read Unicode text versus fonts.