Red Hat Display and Red Hat Text are a brand typeface you can actually ship

A brand identity released as an open font family

The repository holds the Red Hat type family, which covers Red Hat Display and Red Hat Text with a monospace companion, and the licence is the SIL Open Font License. The design has a clear provenance. The fonts were originally commissioned by Paula Scher at Pentagram and designed by Jeremy Mickel, who runs MCKL, a Los Angeles based type foundry and design studio founded in 2012 that publishes original fonts and does custom work for clients. The project frames the release as part of Red Hat's open source model, arguing that how the words look matters as much to the brand voice as the words themselves. The typeface is a superfamily of Display, Text and Mono styles, each with a range of weights in roman and italic, and the fonts are intended to sit together at a range of sizes. In 2021 the family gained Light and Light Italic styles and a Monospace family.

Display, Text and Mono are three different jobs

The design decisions are described in enough detail to be useful, because the split between the families is a typographic argument rather than a naming convention. The Display styles are made for headlines and big statements, and they are low contrast and spaced tightly, with a large x-height and open counters. The Text styles take a slightly smaller x-height and a narrower width for better legibility, are spaced more generously, and have thinned joins, which the project attributes to better performance at small sizes. Those two choices together are the classic trade: tight and open for impact at size, narrow and thin for density in running text. The Mono family extends the same idea to a monospaced cut. The genre reference is stated as a fresh take on the geometric sans, taking inspiration from a range of American sans serifs including Tempo and Highway Gothic, so the lineage is a set of mid century American transport and news faces rather than the European grotesques.

Variable fonts bring a naming trap

Variable fonts are available for each family, and a demo is published at the project's GitHub Pages site. The fonts include the wght axis, which allows interpolation between the light and black weights, so a single file can serve a range of weights. The catch is in the file names. There are two versions of the variable fonts, one with VF in the name and one without, and the reason is a conflict: the project prefers to name the variable versions differently from the OTF and TTF files, but Google requires the names to match. The recommendation is to use one set or the other, never both, which is a decision you have to make before you wire the files into a web font pipeline, because a site that loads both will ship two copies of the same typefaces under different names.

Building from source needs a Python font toolchain

The fonts are built from source with the script at sources/build-all.sh, and the output lands in the fonts directory. The first build needs a virtual environment and a set of Python packages, and the requirements file lists them plainly. The list is short because the heavy lifting is done by well known command line tools that are installed as Python packages, and it is a good sign for reproducibility that the requirements are pinned in a file rather than described in prose.

afdko
fontmake
gftools
statmake
fontbakery
font-v

The environment itself is a standard Python virtual environment, and the project asks you to activate it in every new shell before you work.

cd ~
python3 -m venv venv

source venv/bin/activate

Then the requirements go in, and you need to be inside the repository when you do it.

cd RedHatFont
pip install -U -r requirements.txt

Each family is also built on its own, which is how you rebuild a single family after a change rather than everything. The commands point gftools at the config file in each source directory.

gftools builder source/Mono/config.yaml

gftools builder source/Proportional/RedHatDisplay/config.yaml

gftools builder source/Proportional/RedHatText/config.yaml

The woff2 step is a separate toolchain

Web font output needs the woff2 compressor, and the project is explicit that it is installed separately, in its own terminal session, because it is a C++ project rather than a Python package. The clone and build are two commands, and there is a quick check afterwards.

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

woff2_compress

If the command is not found after that, the project points at the woff2 issue thread about putting the binaries on your path.

Installing the built files on Linux and macOS

For people who just want the fonts, the repository ships prebuilt OTF and TTF files in the fonts folder, and the README gives the package manager routes for the two common platforms. On Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, CentOS 7 and similar derivatives, the packages are installed with yum, and the enterprise Linux users are told to enable the Fedora EPEL repository first. On macOS the Homebrew route installs a cask from the homebrew cask fonts tap, and the command is a text block in the README rather than a shell one, which is a small hint that the maintainers treat the Homebrew path as a one liner rather than a script.

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

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

The two package names cover the Display and Text families separately, and there is no separate Mono package named in the README.

The web demo is a small npm package

The repository also carries a webfonts-demo directory and a package.json, and the manifest is worth a look because it shows how the family is meant to be consumed on the web. The package is published as @redhat/redhat-font at version 5.0.0, its main entry point is red-hat-font.css, and its licence field repeats the OFL-1.1 terms. The scripts tell the story: minify runs csso-cli over the demo stylesheet to produce a minified copy, start runs a copy step and then a browser-sync server over the demo folder, and the copy step is the one that shows which font files matter, because it copies the variable woff2 files out of the three font directories into the demo dist folder. The test script is an empty string, which is a small but telling detail about where the project puts its quality effort: in the fonts themselves, not in the demo. The manifest itself is a small file.

  "name": "@redhat/redhat-font",
  "version": "5.0.0",
  "license": "OFL-1.1"

OFL 1.1 with a reserved font name and no trademark rights

The licensing section is the part to read carefully. The files are licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1, with Reserved Font Name Red Hat, and the copyright line reads Red Hat, Inc. for 2026. The OFL does not grant any rights under trademark law, and all such rights are reserved, so a modified version has to be renamed to avoid using Red Hat trademarks, including the words Red Hat themselves. The practical effect is that you can use, embed and self host the fonts as they are, and the project says so explicitly: since all the fonts here are licensed with permission to redistribute, subject to the licence terms, you are able to self host them. What you cannot do is modify them and keep the name. The repository also carries metainfo, an AUTHORS.txt, a CHANGELOG.md, the OFL.txt and the specimen image, and the release list shows tags 5.0.0, 4.1.0 and 4.0.3, with the last push on 2026-04-28.

Editorial conclusion

Red Hat Display and Red Hat Text suit a team that wants a distinctive, complete superfamily with variable weight and web font builds, and is willing to rename a modified derivative. They do not suit a project that wants to keep the Red Hat name on a modified or subsetted version, because the licence reserves that font name and withholds trademark rights. Before you ship anything, run the build with sources/build-all.sh, check the two variable font naming variants and pick one, and read the reserved font name clause in the OFL text before you rename anything.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: OFL-1.1
3. README
4. RedHatOfficial/RedHatFont on GitHub
5. Releases