Martel
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
Configuration
Select the weights and styles you want to include in your project.
Weights
Package Manager
The recommended way to use fonts in modern web projects.
1. Install Package
pnpm add @fontsource/martel2. Import in App
// Please select at least one weight and style3. CSS Usage
body {
font-family: "Martel", 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
Martel is a libre font development project. Begun in 2008 in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, the first weights of the font family (Martel UltraLight, Light, Regular, DemiBold, Bold, ExtraBold and Heavy) were released in 2014. The Devanagari glyphs to-date have all been designed by Dan Reynolds, whereas the Latin script’s glyphs are based on the Merriweather fonts.
Check out the Martel Sans project, too.
The Martel Devanagari typeface is designed for typesetting immersive-style documents. It may be be used to set long passages of text in languages that are written in the Devanagari script, including Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Sanskrit, etc. Martel Devanagari is a readable typeface whose glyph proportions are inspired by traditional writing and calligraphic styles. Its high-contrast strokes have a diagonal axis, in keeping with the pen-angle most often used for the Devanagari writing system.
The Martel project is led by Dan Reynolds, a type designer in Berlin. To contribute, visit github.com/typeoff/martel
Tags & Moods
Subsets
Install
pnpm add @fontsource/martelDesigned by
Dan Reynolds
Links
License
OFL-1.1