Strip a letterform back to its skeleton and what's left is stroke, counter, and spacing. That is roughly the logic behind Cotham Sans, a sans-serif drawn by Sebastien Sanfilippo, where the shapes stay unornamented and the rhythm does the talking. It ships as a single Regular weight, which sounds limiting until you actually set something in it: one voice, no second-guessing which cut belongs in the headline.

Single-weight families ask a little more of your layout, so let size, spacing, and case carry the hierarchy rather than reaching for a bold you don't have. Set it on open source project documentation sites, SaaS dashboard UI labels, conference wayfinding signage, or the caption blocks in a technical product manual. Coverage runs past 94 Latin-based languages, which earns its keep when you're localizing an app interface or printing packaging copy for several European markets and want one file to handle all of it instead of swapping faces per region.

Pair it with a quiet old-style serif for body copy: the serif carries long reading passages while Cotham Sans takes headings, labels, and small print, and neither one fights the other for attention. Keep the counters breathing by tracking display sizes slightly loose, since tight letterspacing is usually where a clean sans loses whatever character it had. Cotham Sans is free under the Open Font License for personal and commercial work, and the files download directly from this page.