- Free Sans Serif Fonts
- Sans Serif Fonts Examples
- Sans-serif Fonts Free Download
- Sans Serif Fonts For Mac Shortcut
- Common Sans Serif Fonts
- Download 1503 Free Sans Serif Fonts. 1001 Free Fonts offers a huge selection of free Sans Serif Fonts for Windows and Macintosh.
- Download Microsoft Sans Serif font for PC/Mac for free, take a test-drive and see the entire character set. Moreover, you can embed it to your website with @font-face support.
- The list PC and MAC Equivalent Fonts FONTS ( in 12pt) Arial, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif Arial Black, Arial Black, Gadget, sans-serif Comic Sans MS, Comic Sans MS5, cursive Courier New, Courier New, Courier6, monospace Georgia1, Georgia, serif Impact, Impact5, Charcoal6, sans-serif Lucida Console, Monaco5, monospace Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande, sans-serif.
Free Basic Sans Serif fonts (.ttf &.otf). Basic Sans Serif available in Windows and Mac OS X version. TrueType and OpenType fonts. Search from a wide range of typography fonts.
When designing for the web, it is recommended to make sure that the web site will look good on most, if not all, of the computers that will access it. Most of the web users use either Windows or Mac OS to surf the web. Both operating systems come with pre-installed fonts out of the box.
The table below lists web-safe fonts that are common for both Windows and Macintosh. The Windows fonts are included with Windows XP and later, and the Mac fonts are included with Mac OS X. I am not going to mention Windows 98/95 or Mac OS 8/9 as these are legacy systems and the number of users using them for web is shrinking on a daily basis.
Sans-serif Fonts
Font | Sample | Recommended CSS Stack |
---|---|---|
Arial | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet | Arial, “Helvetica Neue”, Helvetica, sans-serif |
Arial Black | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet | Arial Black, sans-serif |
Impact | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet | Impact, sans-serif |
Lucida | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet | Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande, sans-serif |
Tahoma | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet | Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif |
Trebuchet MS | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet | Trebuchet MS, Helvetica, sans-serif |
Verdana | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet | Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif |
MS Sans Serif | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet | MS Sans Serif, Geneva, sans-serif |
Serif Fonts
Font | Sample | Recommended CSS Stack |
---|---|---|
Georgia | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet | Georgia, serif |
Palatino | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet | Palatino Linotype, Palatino, serif |
Times New Roman | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet | Times New Roman, Times, serif |
MS Serif | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet | MS Serif, New York, serif |
Special and monospaced fonts

Font | Sample | Recommended CSS Stack |
---|---|---|
Comic Sans MS | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet | Comic Sans MS, cursive |
Courier | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet | Courier New, Courier, monospace |
Lucida Console | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet | Lucida Console, Monaco, monospace |
Symbol fonts

Font | Sample | Recommended CSS Stack |
---|---|---|
Symbol | Lorem | Symbol |
Webdings | Lorem | Webdings |
Zapf Dingbats | Lorem | Zapf Dingbats |
No doubt that you’ve probably seen a css font-family declaration that didn’t include a specific webfont, but just the sans-serif
fallback, or values like -apple-system
, system-ui
, and BlinkMacSystemFont
.
All of those values will return the operating system’s default sans-serif font, with some differences:
-apple-system
works only for newer MacOS versions (El Capitan and newer) and iOSBlinkMacSystemFont
works only for older Mac OS versions (Yosemite and older)system-ui
works for all operating systems, but there’s one notable exception: it doesn’t work in the Firefox browser. Firefox doesn’t support this value, so your text will be displayed in the default fallback which is a serif fontsans-serif
will work in all browsers and operating systems, but should be only used as fallback, because in some cases operating systems have quirks like different sans font set for web than in its interface
Whether you use a custom font or not, the recommended complete css font-family declaration is:
font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Ubuntu, 'Helvetica Neue', Oxygen, Cantarell, sans-serif;
You can safely omit Oxygen and Cantarell since they are targeted to certain Linux versions only. Roboto, Ubuntu, sans-serif
will be ok for Linux distros.
Default sans-serif font in MacOS
Please note that — although for interface San Francisco is the default sans-serif font — for web -apple-system
will need to be used, as the sans-serif
fallback will display Helvetica instead of San Francisco. (this is one of the quirks I mentioned earlier)
Default sans-serif font in Windows
The difference between Microsoft Sans Serif and MS Sans Serif is that MS Sans Serif was a bitmap/raster font available in 8, 10, 12, 14, 18, and 24 sizes and Microsoft Sans Serif is a TrueType scalable font.
MS Sans Serif was based on Helvetica and in all versions up to Windows 3.1 it was called Helv.
Free Sans Serif Fonts
Default sans-serif font in Linux
Many Linux users re-configure defaults to other fonts like Inter UI or others. So it’s almost impossible to accurately mention defaults, except for the Ubuntu distro which has its own font as default. Red Hat also has commissioned its own fonts, Red Hat Display and Red Hat Text.