Zarame Gothic
Zarame Gothic (ざらめゴシック) is a free Japanese display style gothic (sans-serif) font created by mokuzai, built upon the open-source Zen Kaku Gothic Antique as its base. The name “zarame” (ざらめ) refers to coarse sugar crystals, which is a fitting descriptor for the font’s defining visual treatment: the letterforms have been processed with an ink trap effect (墨だまり) and a deliberate rough, gritty texture. The result is a gothic font that carries an organic, slightly worn quality, as though the characters were stamped with an inked seal rather than rendered digitally clean. It is a simple but effective transformation that gives a familiar sans-serif skeleton a much more characterful and tactile personality.
Because Zarame Gothic is derived entirely from automated processing, the creator notes that some characters may not have been processed as cleanly as others. That said, the overall result is charming and well-suited for display use where a rough, handcrafted impression is desired. The font supports all the character sets inherited from its Zen Kaku Gothic base, including hiragana, katakana, kanji, alphanumerics, and standard punctuation. You can download Zarame Gothic for free and use it in both personal and commercial projects, as it is distributed under the SIL Open Font License.
Usage Permission
- Free for personal, non-commercial, and commercial use.
- Released under SIL Open Font License (OFL) 1.1.
Link
To download, visit the page above and look for the button highlighted in the screenshot below. Click on the red button that says “Free Download” to start the download. Bear in mind that you will need to have a Pixiv account in order to download, which is rather easy to create. Once installed, you can select this font in your writing or design tools under the family name “Zarame Gothic”.
Supported characters
- Hiragana and Katakana
- Kanji (Full JIS Level 1 support, partial Level 2 support)
- Alphanumerics
- Latin and Cyrillic scripts
- Symbols and Punctuations