Bentham
Type with Purpose
Good typography guides attention, improves understanding, and makes communication effortless.
The Anatomy of a Typeface
By FontSide · June 2026
Every typeface is a system of decisions — about stroke contrast, x-height, spacing, and rhythm. The best ones feel invisible: you stop seeing the letters and start hearing the voice behind them. That transparency is the hardest thing to design.
A high x-height opens up the counters and makes small text breathe. Tight tracking pulls a headline together; loose tracking gives a caption room to exhale. None of these choices are accidents — they are arguments about how reading should feel.
Uppercase
Lowercase
Numerals
Symbols
Package Manager
The recommended way to use fonts in modern web projects.
1. Install Package
pnpm add @fontsource/bentham2. Import in App
// Please select at least one weight and style3. CSS Usage
body {
font-family: "Bentham", serif;
}Google Fonts CDN
Use Google's CDN to embed the fonts directly via HTML.
HTML <head>
<!-- Please select at least one weight and style -->Fontsource CDN
Skip the build step by adding this directly to your global CSS file.
Global CSS
/* Please select at least one weight and style */Background & Story
Bentham is inspired by the lettering of nineteenth-century maps, gravestones and the maker’s plates of cast-iron machinery. It is characterized by expressive, flowing, and bulging curves, mannered awkwardness, and the bobbles on the terminals of its characters. The ‘modern face’ type genre is the typographical equivalent, and it can be found in books printed throughout the nineteenth century. This genre survived in educational textbooks produced throughout the twentieth century, and is preserved in computer science as the style which Donald Knuth adopted for his TEX typesetting system.
Bentham is a half-way design; true neither to the type produced during the nineteenth century, nor to the letterforms of cartographers, stonecutters, or engravers. Really it is an examination of the characteristics that these letters share, colored by Ben's approach to type drawing.
Tags & Moods
Subsets
Install
pnpm add @fontsource/benthamDesigned by
Ben Weiner
Links
License
OFL-1.1