Open Sans is an open source humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Steve Matteson, commissioned by Google and released in 2011. It is based on his previous Droid Sans design, designed for Android mobile devices, but slightly wider. Featuring wide apertures on many letters and a large x-height (tall lower-case letters), the typeface is highly legible on screen and at small sizes. Because it belongs to the humanist genre of sans-serif typefaces, it has a true italic. As of July 2018 it is the second most served font on Google Fonts, with over four billion views per day on more than 20 million websites. In March 2021, the family was updated to a variable font family, including Hebrew characters. Use Open Sans is popular in flat design-style web design. Open Sans is used in some of Google's web pages as well as its print and web advertisements. It is the official font of the UK's Labour, Co-operative, and Liberal Democrat parties. Used in WordPress 3.8 which was released on December 12, 2013. Development According to Google, it was developed with an "upright stress, open forms and a neutral, yet friendly appearance" and is "optimized for legibility across print, web, and mobile interfaces." Its design is similar to that of Matteson's Droid Sans, created as the first user interface font for Android phones, but with wider characters and the inclusion of italic variants. Explaining the different name, Matteson has said "Droid was intentionally narrow for mobile screens but it didn't have 'narrow' in the name. Open Sans isn't really 'extended' so that wasn't really an option either. A new family name is the direction they chose." Unicode support The character repertoire contains 897 glyphs, covering the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets with a wide range of diacritics. In January 2014, Israeli type designer Yanek Iontef released an extension font covering the Hebrew alphabet with support for Niqqud (but not Cantillation marks) for early access. The extension font went on to become popular and to be used by prominent institutions such as Tel Aviv University in its 2016 rebranding, and by the Haaretz website. Hebrew support was added in March 2021. Derivatives Open Sans has six weights (Light 300, Normal 400, Medium 500, Semi-Bold 600, Bold 700 and Extra Bold 800), each of them with an italic version, totaling 12 versions, although the Medium and Medium Italic styles are not yet accepted into