Crimson Text
Designed By
Sebastian Kosch
6 Styles Serif
The pleasure
of a well-set
page.
Crimson Text · Regular
Compare this serif family in headings and a continuous reading sample.
6 styles available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.
Download Crimson Text ↓TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
The lamp burned low that night
A Page In Crimson Text
Crimson Text · Regular
Headings, labels and running text.
Notes From The Reading Room
The reading room opens onto a quiet courtyard. Along the shelves, small handwritten labels mark the collections. A visitor leaves a book open beside the window, keeping a place for the next reader.
A heading marks the next chapter. The margins leave room for a note while the text continues across the page.
6 Styles,
One Family
Every available style is shown below in its own font file.
Regular400
The lamp burned low that night
Italic400
The lamp burned low that night
Semi Bold600
The lamp burned low that night
Semi Bold Italic600
The lamp burned low that night
Bold700
The lamp burned low that night
Bold Italic700
The lamp burned low that night
Sebastian Kosch started Crimson Text because he saw a gap among free fonts: there were no Garamond-inspired book faces with all the little niceties, old style figures, small caps, fleurons, math characters. Too much effort, as he saw it, went into free copies of Times and Helvetica. The people whose work he looked to were Jan Tschichold, Robert Slimbach and Jonathan Hoefler.
What you download is 6 styles, Regular, Semi Bold and Bold, each with an italic. The italics are narrow, about 9% shorter across a line than the roman, good for a run of quoted text or a book title inside a sentence.
A round of fixes in March 2022 evened out the line spacing across all styles.
Book production is the stated aim, and we would happily set a novel or a thesis in it at 11 or 12 pt. Discretionary ligatures and a slashed zero are there too, with Vietnamese and extended Latin covered.
Characters & Figures
675 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 400 recorded characters.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ ? !
View The Recorded Character Selection
The Font Files
Download
Crimson Text
6 TTF styles with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 331 KB ↓- Version
- 1.100
- License
- SIL Open Font License 1.1
Install On Your Computer
Extract the ZIP first. On Windows, select the font files and choose Install from the context menu. On macOS, open the files in Font Book and choose Install.
Use On A Website
Keep the font files and the included stylesheet together. Update the stylesheet path to match your project.
<link rel="stylesheet"
href="/fonts/crimson-text-2/crimson-text-2.css">
body {
font-family: 'Crimson Text', sans-serif;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.
Heading & Body
The family provides the heading; Inter carries the supporting text.
Crimson Text Heading · Inter Body
Notes From The Reading Room
The reading room opens onto a quiet courtyard. Along the shelves, small handwritten labels mark the collections. A visitor leaves a book open beside the window, keeping a place for the next reader.