Corben

Try Corben

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Corben Regular
• Bold 700Corben Bold

About Corben

Corben is a display serif built from broad, round curves. In the specimen the capitals are wide, the bowls of C, G and O are close to full circles, and the serifs flow out of the stems through soft brackets instead of sharp corners. The Regular has moderate stroke contrast; the Bold is far heavier, with thick stems, thin joins and tight counters, so the two weights look like a quiet and a loud version of the same lettering. The official notes describe a web-friendly display font with ligatures and a hint of classic display lettering. There are two static files, Regular 400 and Bold 700, and no italics. The 542 glyphs cover Latin and Latin Extended, including the letters for Turkish, Polish, Czech and Romanian. Vernon Adams designed Corben, which is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Corben works

Blog and magazine titles

The Regular's round, wide letters give article titles a soft, bookish tone at sizes where the bracketed serifs can be seen.

Poster lines of a few words

Bold 700 packs thick stems and small counters into a dense word shape that carries a short poster line.

Menus, labels and shop names

Round bowls and soft serifs echo classic display lettering, a tone that fits café menus, jar labels and shopfront names.

Heading plus standfirst

Bold for the heading and Regular for the line beneath give two levels from one family, though without an italic.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Turkish
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Romanian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Estonian

Character sets found in the files: latin, latin-ext. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with Corben

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use Corben on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Corben";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Corben-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Corben";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Corben-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Corben", sans-serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Corben with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Corben:wght@400;700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Two weights, no italic

Corben has Regular 400 and Bold 700 as separate static files. Neither has an italic.

The Bold is much heavier than the Regular

In the specimen the Bold's counters are small and its joins thin, so it needs large sizes; the Regular stays open at smaller ones.

Latin and Latin Extended only

Corben has no Cyrillic, Greek or Vietnamese subset.

FAQs

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All display fonts