Crimson Text

Try Crimson Text

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Crimson Text Regular Italic
• SemiBold 600Crimson Text SemiBold SemiBold Italic
• Bold 700Crimson Text Bold Bold Italic

About Crimson Text

Crimson Text is a serif family that Sebastian Kosch designed for setting books. The official notes describe the aim as a free Garamond-inspired text face that includes refinements such as old-style figures, small caps, fleurons and maths characters, and they cite Jan Tschichold, Robert Slimbach and Jonathan Hoefler as influences. In the specimen the round letters have slanted stress, the serifs are bracketed, the x-height is moderate and the contrast is noticeable without being extreme; the default numerals are lining figures. The family has six static styles: Regular 400, SemiBold 600 and Bold 700, each with an italic. It is not a variable font. The fonts contain 720 glyphs with Latin, extended Latin and Vietnamese subsets. A March 2022 update fixed several bugs and evened out line spacing across the styles. Crimson Text was added to Google Fonts in 2011 and is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Crimson Text works

Novels and book interiors

Book production is the stated purpose, and Regular with its italic covers running text and emphasis.

Essays and journal articles

SemiBold 600 gives subheadings a step up from the text that is gentler than Bold.

Printed reports

Six styles are enough for body, captions, headings and bold-italic emphasis in a document.

Reading-focused blogs

Moderate x-height and bracketed serifs give paragraphs a bookish texture on screen.

Vietnamese prose

The Vietnamese subset is included alongside Latin and extended Latin.

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
• Vietnamese

Character sets found in the files: latin, latin-ext, vietnamese. 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 Crimson Text

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 Crimson Text 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: "Crimson Text";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/CrimsonText-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Crimson Text";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/CrimsonText-BoldItalic.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Crimson Text";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/CrimsonText-Italic.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Crimson Text";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/CrimsonText-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
/* …and 2 more files in the package, declared the same way */

body {
  font-family: "Crimson Text", serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Crimson Text 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=Crimson+Text:ital,wght@0,400;0,600;0,700;1,400;1,600;1,700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Three weights, no light

The weights are 400, 600 and 700; there is no Light or Medium.

Static files

Crimson Text is not a variable font; the package holds six TTF files.

No Cyrillic or Greek

Subsets are Latin, extended Latin and Vietnamese.

FAQs

Collections with Crimson Text

• Fonts for résumés and CVs

  Readable open-license serif and sans-serif families for a one- or two-page CV, with the weights and italics a document needs.

• Old-style and revival serif fonts for books

  Digital revivals of Renaissance, baroque and later book types, and new designs in the old-style tradition, most with italics, for novels, essays and fine printing.

Similar fonts

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