The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Trajan Pro vs Cresci Exemplar Pro
Two commercial all-capitals faces that trace back to classical Roman inscriptional lettering. Trajan Pro is Adobe's 1989 Carol Twombly digitisation of the carved capitals on Trajan's Column, later expanded by Robert Slimbach; Cresci Exemplar Pro is a 2023 California Type Foundry revival of the capitals drawn by the 16th-century Milanese writing master Giovan Francesco Cresci for his Essemplare.
Trajan Pro is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Cinzel, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Trajan Pro → Cresci Exemplar Pro is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Cinzel, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Cresci Exemplar Pro →
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
- Trajan Pro's source is a first-century stone inscription, so its forms are the chiselled Roman square capitals themselves, with small caps filling the lowercase slots rather than a true lowercase.
- Cresci Exemplar Pro revives a Renaissance scribe's interpretation of those monumental capitals, built from high-resolution references to Cresci's printed plates, so it reads as a writing master's refinement rather than the carved original.
- Trajan Pro 3 is a multi-weight family with Greek and Cyrillic, while Cresci Exemplar Pro ships as a single titling style with numerals and symbols drawn to match.
- Both are paid fonts: Trajan comes with Adobe Fonts via a Creative Cloud subscription or through Fontspring, whereas Cresci Exemplar Pro is sold per licence at a far lower list price.
Trajan Pro
Reach for Trajan Pro when you need the familiar, authoritative movie-poster and institutional look with a full weight range and extended language support.
Cresci Exemplar Pro
Reach for Cresci Exemplar Pro for a more refined, Renaissance-flavoured take on Roman capitals in large titling, where one well-drawn style and a modest licence fee are all the job needs.