Higure Gothic
Higure Gothic (ひぐれゴシック) is a free-to-download Japanese font created by mokuzai, built by applying rounded corner (角丸) and ink trap pooling (墨だまり) processing to the open-source Zen Kaku Gothic N. Rounded corners soften the hard edges of a standard gothic (sans-serif), giving each character a gentler, more approachable feel, while ink pooling adds subtle swells of weight at the joints and terminals, mimicking the natural behavior of ink in letterpress printing. Together, they take the clean structure of Zen Kaku Gothic and layer on a kind of nostalgic warmth that the base font doesn’t have on its own.
The result is a font that sits in a sweet spot between modern legibility and a soft, retro character. It’s the kind of face you’d reach for when you want the tidiness of a gothic but need something that doesn’t feel too cold or corporate — think indie game interfaces, atmospheric zine layouts, or web designs that want a little personality without going full-handwriting. Since this font was processed entirely automatically, so there may be occasional imperfections in the rendering. This font family comes with 5 weights, giving you flexibility and variety to explore with this font. It’s released under the SIL Open Font License, making it free to use in both personal and commercial projects.
Usage Permission
- Free for personal, non-commercial, and commercial use.
- Released under SIL Open Font License (OFL) 1.1.
Link
To download, visit the link above and you will see the highlighted download button as shown in the image below. You will need to have a Pixiv account to download, and it’s pretty easy to obtain one. Once installed, you can select this font in your writing or design tools under the family name “Higure Gothic”.
Supported characters
- Hiragana and Katakana
- Kanji (up to JIS Level 1 and 2)
- Alphanumerics
- Symbols and Punctuations