Modern Antiqua

Try Modern Antiqua

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Modern Antiqua Regular

About Modern Antiqua

Modern Antiqua is a display face with roots in stone carving. Wojciech Kalinowski first made it around 1995 for inscriptions he cut professionally, starting from Roman square capitals; at that stage it had only capitals and digits, and the lowercase and symbols were added later when he turned his lettering into fonts. The capitals keep classical proportions with stems that flare into small wedge-shaped serifs. The lowercase is more idiosyncratic: a is a single-storey form with a pointed corner, r ends in a hooked arm, f curls over at the top, and t carries a spur on its crossbar, which gives words a faintly medieval tone. Figures share the flared stroke endings. The family consists of one Regular style, not variable, with 395 glyphs across the Latin and Latin Extended subsets.

Where Modern Antiqua works

Plaques and memorial lettering

The capitals were designed to be cut in stone, so they suit engraved or sandblasted inscriptions and their printed mock-ups.

Fantasy and historical titles

Flared stems and the hooked r and single-storey a give book covers and game titles an antique flavour.

Wine, craft and deli labels

Classical capitals with wedge serifs set a product name with a traditional feel in a small space.

Headings in capitals

Since the design began as capitals and digits, all-caps lines with dates or numbers are its most settled use.

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 Modern Antiqua

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 Modern Antiqua 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: "Modern Antiqua";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/ModernAntiqua-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

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

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Modern Antiqua 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=Modern+Antiqua&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Lowercase came later

The small letters were added after the capitals and have unusual forms, especially a, r, f and t.

One style

Modern Antiqua has Regular 400 only, with no italic or bold.

Latin Extended included

Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian and Turkish letters are present; Cyrillic and Greek are not.

FAQs

Collections with Modern Antiqua

• Roman capital and inscriptional fonts for titles

  Capitals drawn after Roman inscriptions and flared lettering, for film-style titles, monograms, certificates and luxury branding.

Similar fonts

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