Red Hat Typeface Files

Designers

Jeremy Mickel

Jeremy Mickel runs MCKL, a Los Angeles-based type foundry and design studio publishing original fonts and creating custom designs for clients. Founded in 2012, MCKL has collaborated with leading design firms, companies, and organizations around the world to provide custom typeface and logo design services. Mickel's work has been recognized by the Type Directors Club and the AIGA, and he has taught at RISD and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

About Red Hat Display and Red Hat Text

Red Hat is an enterprise software company with an open source development model. We use collaboration and knowledge sharing to craft better, more reliable, and more adaptable technologies. How our words look is as important to our brand voice as the words we choose. That’s why we developed a type family that’s all our own.

The Red Hat Typeface is a superfamily of Display, Text, and Mono styles, each with a range of weights in roman and italic. The fonts were originally commissioned by Paula Scher / Pentagram and designed by Jeremy Mickel / MCKL for the new Red Hat identity.

Red Hat is a fresh take on the geometric sans genre, taking inspiration from a range of American sans serifs including Tempo and Highway Gothic. The Display styles, made for headlines and big statements, are low contrast and spaced tightly, with a large x-height and open counters. The Text styles have a slightly smaller x-height and narrower width for better legibility, are spaced more generously, and have thinned joins for better performance at small sizes. In 2021 we added Light and Light Italic styles, and a Monospace family. The fonts can be used together seamlessly at a range of sizes.

As part of Red Hat’s commitment to open source software, the fonts are made available for use under the SIL Open Font License.

Variable Fonts

A demo for variable fonts is available at https://redhatofficial.github.io/RedHatFont/.

Variable fonts are available for each of the Red Hat Typeface families. The fonts include the wght axis, which allows for interpolation between light and black weights.

There are two versions of the variable fonts: with and without VF in the name. It is Red Hat's preference to name these differently than the OTF / TTF fonts, but Google requires the names to be the same. We recommend using either the VF or standard named variable fonts, but not both.

Building the Fonts

From terminal, run the build script at sources/build-all.sh. Fonts output to fonts/.

NOTE: The first time you build, you will need to set up a virtual environment and install dependencies:

Setting up the build environment (Click to expand)

Set up the environment

The basics

You will need to open a terminal to run the following commands.

Clone the repo & navigate into it:

git clone https://github.com/RedHatOfficial/RedHatFont.git
cd RedHatFont

Check that you have Python 3:

which python3

It should return a path ending with python3, such as /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/bin/python3. If it returns an error like python3 not found, you will need to download Python 3.

Setting up a virtual environment

To build, set up the virtual environment:

cd ~
python3 -m venv venv

Then activate it:

source venv/bin/activate

Now, install requirements:

cd RedHatFont
pip install -U -r requirements.txt

Give the build scripts permission to run/execute (you can copy & paste, then run both lines in the terminal at once):

chmod +x build-scripts/*.sh
chmod +x mastering/make-github-release/**/*.sh

Making woff2 files

Finally, you will also need to separately install google/woff2 to enable the woff2_compress and woff2_decompress commands. Open a new terminal session, window, or tab to do this step.

# open a new terminal session first, then run
git clone --recursive https://github.com/google/woff2.git
cd woff2
make clean all

To make sure woff2_compress is installed properly, enter the following inyour terminal window:

woff2_compress

If terminal cannot find the command, you may need to ensure binaries are in $PATH, a description of which you can find here.

Once woff2_compress is working in your terminal, you can now run the build!

Build fonts

Once you have set up the environment (see above), you can build fonts & prep releases!

To build variable and static fonts, plus make woff2s, use build-all.sh. This takes awhile (most of the time is taken up by building TTF & OTF static fonts).

build-scripts/build-all.sh

If you just want to build variable fonts, use build.sh:

build-scripts/build-vf.sh

To build only the static fonts (these are secondary to the variable fonts, so you can’t set the version numbers in this script), use build-statics.sh:

build-scripts/build-statics.sh

Installation

The OTF or TTF folders contain the font files used by most user operating systems.

If you are running Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, CentOS 7, or any similar derivatives, you can install the fonts with the following:

sudo yum install redhat-display-fonts redhat-text-fonts

Note that Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS users will need to enable Fedora EPEL first.

If you are running Homebrew, you can install the fonts with the following:

brew cask install homebrew/cask-fonts/font-redhat

Bug reports and improvement requests

If you find a problem with a font file or have a request for future development of a font project, please create a new issue in this project's issue tracker.

Self-Host Fonts Available From Red Hat

Since all the fonts available here are licensed with permission to redistribute, subject to the license terms, you are able to self-host the fonts in this project.

Licensing

Copyright 2021 Red Hat, Inc.

Licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1, with Reserved Font Name Red Hat.

The SIL OFL does not grant any rights under trademark law and all such rights are reserved. Modified versions must be renamed to avoid use of any Red Hat trademarks, including but not limited to "Red Hat".