Google Updated Its Classic Roboto Font With a Customizable Flex Edition

Google has updated its classic Roboto font and introduced its highly customizable, scalable, adaptable, and optimizable edition dubbed Roboto Flex, the company announced in its blog. The new font was created by a team of six Font Bureau designers, including David Berlow, Santiago Orozco, Irene Vlachou, Ilya Ruderman, Yury Ostromentsky, and Mikhail Strukov.

Roboto Flex by @fontbureau is here!

After 5 years of intensive development, its huge range of weights and widths across a complete stack of optical sizes is ready for you to use in all kinds of products and documents.https://t.co/jWiAbuqypL

🧵 pic.twitter.com/c1gkLHhxCY
— Google Fonts (@googlefonts) May 5, 2022

The original Roboto font was launched back in 2011 and has long been the default font on Android and is the most popular Google Fonts font. It's been a key part of Google's visual style for years. As the style evolved, the Roboto font adapted to different formats. Over the past 11 years, it has grown into several variants: Roboto Sans, Condensed, Slab, Mono, and Serif.

Now, the company has introduced the new Roboto Flex variation as a "major upgrade" and "Google Fonts' biggest project to date."

By default, users can customize the font by 12 basic typographic parameters. Users can change its width, stroke thickness, and the heights of ascending and descending stems. This allows text to be as bold, wide, or narrow as desired.

Google Introduced a New Font That Makes Online Reading Easier

Google says that the average user spends up to seven hours a day reading something on the Internet, so the new font has been specifically designed to improve readability.

The Internet ProtocolKay Lee

Font Bureau spokesman David Berlow emphasized that such Roboto Flex tools can help the user solve almost any typographic task.

Roboto Flex is open source and available for download on Google Fonts today.