We are excited to share that we’re releasing our own custom Roblox font family: Builder. It is available for you to use in your experiences on the Creator Store now and soon will be used on the Roblox App, Website, and Creator Hub.
Our font family name, Builder, is in appreciation of our amazing creator community and comes in three different subfamilies:
Builder Sans: Our platform font, designed for high readability in all sizes and for all screen conditions.
Builder Extended: An expressive, flexible and bold variant crafted from the Builder DNA.
Builder Mono: A monospaced variant made for your coding workflows in Roblox Studio.
Why Builder?
As part of our commitment to enhancing quality at Roblox, we are making improvements to our design language across the platform. This new font family provides maximum readability and functionality in all screen conditions. Additionally, introducing Builder allows for a cohesive Roblox brand identity.
With the introduction of our new font family, we will be removing the Gotham & Arial fonts from Roblox by the end of May. We will update you on the exact date in the near future.
If you are currently using Gotham or Arial in your experiences, we suggest you switch to visually similar fonts:
If you do not make any changes before Gotham and Arial are removed, both will automatically be replaced with Montserrat and Arimo respectively within your experience.
Builder is available for you to install from the Creator Store here. Please let us know your feedback and questions!
FAQ
Where can I use Builder?
Builder can be used in any User Generated Content on the Roblox platform including but not limited to experiences, thumbnails, plugins, and avatar items. Builder can be used off the Roblox platform for digital promotions of your creations incorporating that User Generated Content. We’ve updated the Builder Font License to better reflect this.
Are there major differences between the replacement fonts? If so, what are they?
Arimo is the font that will replace Arial for its use on Roblox. Arimo was designed to be metrically compatible with Arial, which means that both fonts are not only visually similar but also have identical width and height for each glyph. Arimo also offers improved on-screen readability.
Montserrat will replace the Gotham font for its use on Roblox. Montserrat shares several of the characteristics of Gotham in glyph width, height, and extended anatomy. More importantly, it brings strong compatibility and legibility to support all the different platforms and screens Roblox is available on.
The custom font is interesting. Good to see all the weight variations are there and a monospace version.
For Gotham and Arial, what is the reason for replacing them? Is a technical reason like Builder, or something like licensing costs? Without a stated reason, I don’t understand why they are being replaced besides just assuming licensing.
Edit: And adding to above, I see we can’t use Builder off-platform. What does that mean for any screenshots or marketing material we use off-platform?
Well screw me and almost all the UI I’ve ever made ever, I guess. This is certainly an unwelcome and potentially breaking change.
I’ve carefully designed all my UI to accommodate the size and spacing of the Gotham font, and now I’m being told I have a month to drop everything and go back through all my UI and design it around a new font that looks completely different.
I think it’s weird that you’re releasing a font (and especially how excited you are about releasing said font), but it’s not like it’s a negative thing.
On the other hand, I understand that you’ve literally shown us how little the difference between the two deprecated fonts are, but why do you need to replace them.
After seeing the font, I honestly enjoyed a lot! The typography is simple like Open Sans and can genuinely give a modern perspective.
In another hands, I believe deprecating the 2 fonts mentioned is unnecessary as there are creators that may use it for their projects and, now, need to face these challenges. It would be fine to let them stay where they are.
I came to read this post with low expectations but I am pleasantly surprised with the great change! the Builder font does seem to follow the current identity offering crisp versatile uses that can do fine in most environments.
Although I have the nitpick that A. the X-height of the font feels too high, readability especially on light and thin configurations doesn’t seem to be as good because of that, and B. not all the letters (at least from the style sheet) have the same cap height.
As for Montserrat and Arimo it’s a great, respectable choice to step out of classics and I feel like the choices (especially arimo) are really good at solving problems especially with inconsistencies on both Gotham and Arial.
I am quite happy with it!
It’s a good font, but the license needs adjustments imo. Off-platform distribution should be allowed if its purpose is to communicate about Roblox UGC (games, assets, plugins, etc.)
I don’t see the point in deprecating fonts, especially since we have a font marketplace now. Visual breaking changes are still breaking changes, and it’s unfortunate there hasn’t been much thought on this.
Can we expect an upload of Arial and Gotham on the font marketplace?
With the release of the USD marketplace, this can eventually be a paid font if licensing costs were the reason for deprecation.
Some explanation as to why Gotham and Arial are being removed would’ve been nice. A lot of games use Gotham (including my projects) and I find the difference between the two significant enough for me to like Gotham more out of the two.
You are planning to remove the font you are currently using for the website? I recommend keeping it becuase I use gotham in every game I made, I don’t like going to every game I made and fixing it when a breaking change comes
Why would you recommend an alternative that doesn’t even support Greek? Gotham has support for Greek, Latin and Cyrillic, and looks better
