Recursive

Designed by Arrow Type, Stephen Nixon

7 weights • Version 44 • On Google Fonts since 2020 • Popularity #814

Quick Summary

7

Styles

300-900

Weight Range

5

Variable axes

4

Languages / Subsets

Category
sans-serif
Best for
textdisplay
Descriptors
code
Variable axes
CasualCursiveMonospaceSlantWeight
Scripts
Cyrillic, Latin, Vietnamese
Origin
United States
License
SIL Open Font License
Last updated
Sep 5, 2025

© 2019 The Recursive Project Authors

The quick brown fox

32px

About Recursive Fonts

Recursive is typographic palette for UI & code. It draws inspiration from single-stroke casual, a style of brush writing used in signpainting that is stylistically flexible and warmly energetic. Recursive adapts this aesthetic basis into an extensive variable font family, designed to excel in digital interactive environments, including data-rich user interfaces, technical documentation, and code editors.

Recursive offers a lot more styles than you see here! To download the full Recursive Sans & Mono family, learn more about its 5 variable axes, and to configure advanced Google Fonts URL embed code for access to Recursive’s full stylistic range, check out its website at:

→ recursive.design

The Recursive project is led by Arrow Type, a type foundry based in Brooklyn, NY, USA. To contribute, see its GitHub repo.

Update, April 2021: the Google Fonts release of Recursive has been updated to incorporate various changes from its initial release. This includes fixes that correct printing issues, ensure consistent default line heights between styles on macOS, improve the handling of combining accents, add localization features for several languages, and resolve various other earlier issues.

Who Designed Recursive?

Arrow Type portrait

Arrow Type

Arrow Type is a type foundry and studio practice based in Brooklyn, NY which specializes in custom type, type design, and font development, run by Stephen Nixon. Previously, Stephen worked in digital product design and brand experience design at IBM. In 2018, Stephen graduated with a Master’s degree in Type and Media from The Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague, Netherlands. In 2019, Google Fonts commissioned and published Arrow Type’s first release, Recursive. Today, Arrow Type has a focus on creating fonts that are beautiful, uniquely useful, and tell a story.

arrowtype.com | GitHub | YouTube | Instagram

Stephen Nixon portrait

Stephen Nixon

Stephen Nixon designs & develops fonts, tools, and websites as Arrow Type. Previously, he was in the KABK TypeMedia class of 2018. Before that, he designed and built websites and brand tools at IBM.

stephennixon.com | GitHub | Twitter | Instagram

Google FontsSource CodeOfficial Website

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