Pollen is a free, open-source variable typeface by Nidheesh Vakharia. One font file covers weight 400–700 and roundness 0–100, from sharp corners to soft ones.

Is Pollen free for commercial use?

Yes. Pollen is licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, so you can use it in personal and commercial work, including websites and apps. You can't sell the font files on their own, and copies must keep the copyright notices and the license.

What is Pollen based on?

Pollen is built from Open Runde by Laurids Kern, a rounded take on Inter by Rasmus Andersson. Pollen joins Open Runde's four static weights into one variable font and adds a roundness axis.

What does the roundness axis do?

The ROND axis runs from 0 to 100. At 100, the default, corners are fully rounded like Open Runde. At 0 they are sharp, close to Inter. Values in between blend the two.

How do I use Pollen on a website?

Download Pollen[ROND,wght].woff2, load it with @font-face and font-weight: 400 700, then set font-weight for weight and font-variation-settings: "ROND" 0–100 for roundness.

Which languages does Pollen support?

Pollen covers Latin (including accented letters), Greek and Cyrillic, with 2,494 characters.

Pollen

By Nidheesh Vakharia

Pollen is a free, open-source typeface with two dials: weight, from Regular to Bold, and roundness, from crisp corners to soft ones. It grows out of Open Runde, the rounded take on Inter, which only came as four separate weights. Pollen joins them into one variable file, fills in every weight in between, and adds roundness, so a single font can go from sharp to soft.

Weight400

Roundness100

Type scale

Major second · ×1.125 · 16px base

Display65.8 / 1.0
Small things carry far
Heading 152 / 1.05
A grain of pollen weighs almost nothing
Heading 241.1 / 1.1
It still crosses fields, rivers and cities
Heading 332.4 / 1.2
Wind, water and wings do the work
Heading 425.6 / 1.25
One bee visits thousands of flowers a day
Heading 520.3 / 1.3
Most grains measure 15 to 100 microns
Heading 618 / 1.4
The outer wall is called the exine
Lead22.8 / 1.45
Pollen is how most plants move their genes from one flower to another, and it has been doing so for over 300 million years.
Body large18 / 1.6
Each grain is a tiny capsule. Its hard shell protects the cells inside from sunlight, drought and time, which is why pollen survives in lake mud for millennia.
Body16 / 1.6
Scientists read those layers of mud like pages. By counting grains of oak, pine and grass, they can tell what a landscape looked like ten thousand years ago.
Small14.2 / 1.55
Pollen counts are reported in grains per cubic metre of air, averaged over 24 hours.
Caption12.6 / 1.45
Fig. 3 — Sunflower pollen under a scanning electron microscope, magnified 2,000×.
Overline12.6 / 1.3
Botany · Field notes · No. 14
Button14.2 / 1.0
Download specimen
Code14.2 / 1.6
font-variation-settings: "ROND" 40;

Long-form text

Article

How a meadow keeps its own diary

Every spring, a fine yellow layer settles on ponds and lakes. Most of it sinks, and the record it leaves can last for thousands of years.

That layer is pollen. Each year it is buried by mud and more pollen, and over centuries the thin layers stack up into an archive of the plants that grew nearby.

Reading the layers

Every species makes a grain with its own shape. Count the grains in each layer, and you can tell what the landscape looked like long ago.

“The mud doesn’t forget. It just waits for someone to ask the right question.”

From grain to forecast

Pollen does more than record the past. The same grains that settle in lakes also drift through city air every spring, and counting them tells people with hay fever what kind of day to expect.

Traps on rooftops pull in a steady stream of air and catch whatever floats past on a sticky strip. Each morning someone counts the grains under a microscope and sorts them by plant.

Birch tends to peak first, then oak and grasses follow as the weather warms. A dry, windy week can carry grains for hundreds of kilometres before they come down.

Rain does the opposite. It washes the air clean, which is why the hour after a shower is often the easiest time of the day to be outside.

Numbers and OpenType

Off / on

Slashed zero
zeroID 10203040ID 10203040
Fractions
frac1/2 3/4 5/81/2 3/4 5/8
Ordinals
ordn1a 2o No.1a 2o No.
Case forms
case(HELLO)-[WORLD](HELLO)-[WORLD]
SuperscriptsE = mc² · H₂Ox³ + y³ ≠ z³
Figures$1,204.50 · €3831.10.2026 · 14:05

Axes

wght 400–700 · ROND 0–100

Glyphs

Questions

About Pollen

What is Pollen?
Pollen is a free, open-source variable typeface by Nidheesh Vakharia. One font file covers weight 400–700 and roundness 0–100, from sharp corners to soft ones.
Is Pollen free for commercial use?
Yes. Pollen is licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, so you can use it in personal and commercial work, including websites and apps. You can't sell the font files on their own, and copies must keep the copyright notices and the license.
What is Pollen based on?
Pollen is built from Open Runde by Laurids Kern, a rounded take on Inter by Rasmus Andersson. Pollen joins Open Runde's four static weights into one variable font and adds a roundness axis.
What does the roundness axis do?
The ROND axis runs from 0 to 100. At 100, the default, corners are fully rounded like Open Runde. At 0 they are sharp, close to Inter. Values in between blend the two.
How do I use Pollen on a website?
Download Pollen[ROND,wght].woff2, load it with @font-face and font-weight: 400 700, then set font-weight for weight and font-variation-settings: "ROND" 0–100 for roundness.
Which languages does Pollen support?
Pollen covers Latin (including accented letters), Greek and Cyrillic, with 2,494 characters.