Judson

Try Judson

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Judson Regular Italic
• Bold 700Judson Bold

About Judson

Judson is a serif typeface with a practical purpose: its designer, Daniel Johnson, drew it for African literacy and filled it with the letters, accented forms and precomposed combinations needed by the languages of Africa that use Latin-based alphabets. OpenType tables position diacritical marks, including marks stacked on one another, and the designer's notes stress that each character should be easy to tell from the others, in the italic as well. The roman also carries the International Phonetic Alphabet. In the specimen Judson is a moderately contrasted book face with bracketed serifs, round ball terminals on a, c, f and r, and fairly wide, open letters. Three styles exist, Regular, Italic and Bold; there is no bold italic. The fonts hold 855 glyphs across Latin, Latin Extended and Vietnamese, and the license is the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Judson works

Literacy and school material

The glyph set was assembled for African languages in Latin script, with OpenType positioning for their diacritics.

Dictionaries and language study

The roman includes the International Phonetic Alphabet, so pronunciations can share a typeface with the entries.

Books and reports

Regular, Italic and Bold cover text, emphasis and headings in a conventional book setting.

Text with stacked accents

Marks placed above other marks are positioned by the font, which also helps Vietnamese and tone-marked text.

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 Judson

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

body {
  font-family: "Judson", serif;
}

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

Things to know

No bold italic

Judson has Regular, Italic and Bold. Software that needs a bold italic will synthesise one.

IPA in the roman

According to the designer's notes, International Phonetic Alphabet support is in the regular roman face.

Static files

The package contains three static TrueType files. Judson is not a variable font.

FAQs

Collections with Judson

• Serif fonts for academic and scholarly writing

  Text families with very large character sets for theses, journals and critical editions: Greek, Cyrillic, phonetic and historical characters.

Similar fonts

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