Charli xcx's Brat album cover features two distinct fonts: Arial Narrow Regular and Compacta Black. On Charli xcx's official brat generator website, covers with green and white backgrounds use Arial Narrow Regular, while covers with blue backgrounds use Compacta Black. Due to the popularity of Charli xcx's Brat album, these have become the signature brat fonts.
Arial Narrow Regular
Arial Narrow Regular is a condensed regular style font from the Arial font family, featuring distinctive design characteristics and broad practical applications.
Commercial Use
This font is licensed by Monotype/Microsoft. According to Microsoft's font system overview[1], Arial Narrow is a proprietary commercial font, not open source. If your computer or software (such as Microsoft Office, Windows system) comes with Arial Narrow pre-installed, you can use it in those environments for both personal and commercial purposes (documents, printing, presentations).
However, you cannot freely distribute the font files (.ttf/.otf) to others. Additionally, when using it for embedded fonts in apps, websites, or games, you typically need to purchase additional Webfont or App licenses.
Alternative Fonts
Arimo: Open source by Google Fonts, designed to replace commercial Arial Narrow fonts. This font was designed by Steve Matteson, a professional type designer.
Liberation Sans Narrow: Open source by RedHat, completely free, and highly compatible with Arial Narrow font.
Font Characteristics
As a "Narrow" variant, its most distinctive feature is that character width is narrower than standard Arial, with obvious horizontal compression. This design allows more content to fit in limited space, making it particularly suitable for dense typography or space-saving scenarios (such as tables, title bars, newspaper column headers, etc.).
Clean Sans-Serif Style It inherits the typical sans-serif design of the Arial family, with stroke endings free of decorative details and clean, flowing lines. This characteristic gives it excellent clarity in both screen display and print, maintaining readability even at small font sizes.
Uniform and Stable Strokes The font's horizontal and vertical stroke contrast is gentle, with balanced overall visual weight and no exaggerated thickness variations. This stability makes it appear professional and steady in formal documents, business materials, or bulk typography, avoiding visual interference.
High Compatibility and Readability As a derivative of the Arial family, it has excellent compatibility with system default fonts and is natively supported or easily installed on almost all operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux, etc.) and design software (such as Office, Adobe suite). The sans-serif design and compact structure maintain clear readability in both screen display (such as web pages, app interfaces) and printed materials (such as manuals, reports), making it especially suitable for body text, annotations, or auxiliary text.
Usage Scenarios
- Newspaper and magazine subheadings, table text content, manual text content.
- When space is limited but you want to display more information.
- Body text content in Word, Excel, PowerPoint.
Compacta Black
Compacta Black is a bold style within the Compacta font family, featuring unique design characteristics and wide application scenarios. The Compacta font family was designed by Fred Lambert in 1963 and later published by ITC (International Typeface Corporation).
At the time, this font was primarily used for magazine and poster titles or headlines. All fonts have very narrow letter spacing, with minimal spacing between letters. The whitespace between strokes appears almost like small white stripes and dots, creating a sharp contrast with the black stripes of the text lines. Compacta font is not suitable for long text but is highly effective in titles and headlines.
Commercial Use
Compacta is a commercial font released by ITC, so it's legally protected. You need to purchase a license to use this font. We recommend purchasing font licenses through legitimate channels, such as MyFonts.
Many websites offer free download packages for Compacta Black font, but they don't provide licensing information or declare personal use only. You should use caution. When using font packages downloaded from the internet, it's best to check for License files and confirm whether there are copyright risks.
Alternative Fonts
Anton: Open source by Google Fonts, designed by Vernon Adams. Anton is a reinterpretation of traditional advertising sans-serif fonts.
Oswald: Open source by Google Fonts, also co-designed by Vernon Adams.
Characteristics
Compact Character Shape: Character width is narrow with very small spacing between letters, creating a dense and powerful visual impression.
Bold Strokes: Stroke lines are heavy and thick, with strong visual impact that quickly attracts attention on the page.
Modern Style: Overall style is clean and modern. The sans-serif design makes it look neat and sharp, fitting modern design aesthetic trends.
High Contrast: The bold strokes combined with small character spacing create high contrast, ensuring good readability against various backgrounds.
Usage Scenarios
Headlines: Due to its strong visual impact and compact form, it's perfect for newspaper, magazine, and book titles, as well as large headlines in advertisements and posters, effectively capturing readers' attention.
Logo Design: Can be used to create unique and eye-catching brand logos, helping brands stand out in the market and conveying professional, modern, and powerful brand images.
Product Packaging: In product packaging design, Compacta Black font can make product names or key information more prominent, increasing the visual appeal of packaging and enhancing the product's market competitiveness.
Charli xcx's official brat generator uses commercial fonts, and we assume they purchased commercial licenses. Perhaps the brat album covers were actually created on this website. For individual users, we still recommend using alternative versions of these two fonts to avoid unnecessary copyright disputes, and the free alternative fonts are already very close to these commercial fonts.
[1] Arial Narrow font family overview: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/arial-narrow