Menbere
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-variable/menbere2. Import in App
import '@fontsource-variable/menbere/wght.css';3. CSS Usage
body {
font-family: "Menbere Variable", sans-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
/* menbere-latin-wght-normal */
@font-face {
font-family: "Menbere Variable";
font-style: normal;
font-display: swap;
font-weight: 100 900;
src: url(https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/fontsource/fonts/menbere:vf@latest/latin-wght-normal.woff2)
format("woff2-variations");
}Background & Story
Menbere is an Ethiopic font with a Latin matched to it. Aleme Tadesse designed Menbere with assistance from Eben Sorkin for the Latin. It is publishing by Sorkin Type Co. While contemporary in feeling, Menbere avoids being influenced by the Latin script. In the design of Menbere, Aleme judiciously modernizes traditional Ethiopic using low-contrast strokes that retain traditional gestures. Due to its multiple weights, and formal style, Menbere is an excellent choice for use in corporate design, both in print and on screen as well as UI and wayfinding. Menbere is also well suited to mixed script typesetting.
Menbere is named after Alame’s mother. “Menbere” means “seat of honor”. Menbere uses different word spaces for texts set in Ge’ez derived languages vs those in Latin for additional ease in reading with the Ethiopic script benefiting from a more expansive word space. All Ge’ez script derived languages are covered including Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre, Bilen, and Harari.
To contribute, see github.com/SorkinType/Menbere.
Tags & Moods
Subsets
Install
pnpm add @fontsource-variable/menbereDesigned by
Aleme Tadesse, Sorkin Type, Eben Sorkin
Links
License
OFL-1.1