I’m the Manager for the NSW Government Brand team. My team manages the NSW Government brand and guidelines. We’re looking into potential font options for NSW Government branding so that we can have a more unified font across print and digital (we currently use Montserrat for digital and Gotham for print). Gotham is a licensed font so there is a cost to use. One of the fonts we are investigating is Public Sans. It’s an open source font and is free for teams to download and use for both print and digital. It’s been developed by the US Government so accessibility and government needs have been a consideration. I would love to know if anyone has worked with this font before or has any feedback or comments around moving to use of this font in the future?
Hi !
This is an old topic and you were finally choose Public Sans as the unique Font for both digital and print
I’m very interested to know why you decided to stop using Montserrat ?
Do you thing that, for digital product, Montserrat is a good choice for both body and titles ?
Public Sans is a more accessible font and has been designed by the US Government with consideration for accessibility, legibility and readability. The font has been developed with differentiation between 1 ,i and l, a large x-height, large open counters and comes in a broad range of weights and italics. It performs well in headlines, text, and UI.
Public Sans also works well for both print and digital environments. It’s important to have consistency in both of these environments so that people can clearly identify where information is coming from and know it’s a legitimate and trusted source. As Montserrat is a much wider font it can be problematic in print and online documents and doesn’t perform as well when you have large amounts of information as it’s designed to work best for shorter pieces of content.
It’s been developed for outcome-based continuous improvement which means we can continue to work towards meeting the latest accessibility and best practice standards.
