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atelier-anchor/smiley-sans

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TLDR

Smiley Sans is a free Chinese display typeface covering 8,335 characters plus Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts, released in OTF, TTF, and WOFF2 formats under the open SIL font license.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((smiley-sans))
    What It Is
      Chinese display typeface
      8335 characters
      Humanist geometric blend
    Formats
      OTF desktop
      TTF desktop
      WOFF2 web
    Scripts Covered
      Simplified Chinese
      Latin 100 languages
      Cyrillic Greek
    Best Uses
      Posters video titles
      E-commerce graphics
      Book covers editorial
    License
      SIL OFL v1.1
      Free to use
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Code map

Detail Auto

An interactive map of this repo's files and how they connect — its source is parsed live in your browser. Click Visualize to build it.

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Add a stylish condensed Chinese display font to a poster, video title, or e-commerce graphic

USE CASE 2

Embed the WOFF2 file on a website to display Chinese headings in a modern, slightly slanted style

USE CASE 3

Use in Adobe software or Microsoft Office for book covers and editorial design

USE CASE 4

Mix Chinese and Latin text in a multilingual design without switching fonts

Tech stack

OTFTTFWOFF2

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min
Use, modify, and redistribute freely for any purpose, including commercially, as long as you do not sell the font file on its own.

In plain English

Smiley Sans (得意黑) is a free Chinese typeface, meaning a font designed for the Chinese writing system. It was created by the design studio atelierAnchor with the goal of finding a visual balance between the warm, humanist qualities often seen in calligraphy-influenced lettering and the clean geometric forms associated with modern display fonts. The result is a typeface described as condensed and slightly slanted, with character details drawn from the aesthetic traditions of hand-drawn title lettering. The font covers 8,335 Chinese characters, encompassing the characters needed for everyday use in Simplified Chinese. Beyond Chinese characters, it also includes Latin letters supporting over 100 languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Finnish, Vietnamese, and more), Cyrillic letters, Greek letters, Japanese hiragana, Arabic numerals, and a variety of punctuation marks, making it capable of handling multilingual text that mixes Chinese with other scripts. The font file is released in OTF and TTF formats for desktop installation and WOFF2 format for use on websites. Installation follows standard operating system procedures: double-clicking the file on Windows or macOS, using Homebrew on macOS with a command, or installing from the Arch Linux user repository on Linux. It can also be used in design applications like Adobe software, Microsoft Office, and the iPad drawing app Procreate. The README notes a few things to keep in mind: the typeface makes some stylistic choices that depart from mainland Chinese calligraphic standards, meaning a few stroke shapes look different from what strict official style guides would require. The designers suggest it works best for display and visual design contexts such as posters, e-commerce graphics, video titles and subtitles, and book covers. They recommend against using it for body text, programming code, or mobile user interfaces. The font is released under the SIL Open Font License v1.1, which allows free use, modification, and redistribution.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
I want to use Smiley Sans on my website. Write the CSS @font-face rule to load the WOFF2 file and apply it to all headings.
Prompt 2
Write a Python script using Pillow to render a Chinese text poster image using the local TTF file from Smiley Sans.
Prompt 3
How do I install Smiley Sans on macOS using Homebrew and use it in Adobe Illustrator for a bilingual English-Chinese poster?
Prompt 4
I'm designing a YouTube thumbnail with Chinese text. How do I set the title font to Smiley Sans in Figma?
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