The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Free font
Abril Fatface
A free alternative to Bodoni.
About Abril Fatface
Abril Fatface is TypeTogether's 2011 heavy-weight Didone display serif, drawn after the 19th-century British and Spanish poster types. It keeps the Didone essentials — vertical stress, high contrast, flat serifs — but at a mass no text-sized revival attempts, with hairlines that stay thin against very heavy stems for maximum contrast at large sizes.
As a free alternative it shares Bodoni's DNA exactly while running far heavier than Bodoni's standard cuts, which is what makes it the right pick when a headline needs to shout rather than hold a page of text. Set it large: at display scale the contrast reads as authority and the poster heritage comes through, while at body sizes the hairlines simply disappear. Free through Google Fonts.
- Designer
- TypeTogether
- Released
- 2011
- Available at
- Google Fonts →
Abril Fatface is also a free alternative to…
- Bodoni → Heavy-weight Didone display serif inspired by 19th-century British and Spanish poster types. Higher weight than Bodoni's standard cuts but the same vertical-stress / high-contrast DNA — the right pick when the headline needs to shout.
- Fenice → A fat-face Didone that picks up where Fenice Ultra sits: heavy stems against hairline thins, built for big poster sizes. It is bolder and wider than any Fenice weight below Ultra and has no lighter styles, so it pairs best with one of the other alternatives for the rest of the range.
- Normandia → A fat-face Didone by TypeTogether built on the same nineteenth-century model Butti was reworking: huge stroke contrast, hairline serifs and ball terminals against massive thick strokes. The closest match in weight and purpose, though it is a single roman style with no italic or outline.
- Pistilli Roman → A heavy fat-face didone whose massive stems against thread-thin hairlines echo the bold weight of Pistilli Roman at poster sizes. It is a single black weight derived from British advertising types, so it is chunkier and more theatrical, and lacks the elegant lighter regular that defines the original.
- Butler → A fat-face Didone built for posters, matching the punch of Butler Extra Bold and Black with hairline serifs against heavy stems. It is a single display weight with rounder, more advertising-era forms, so it covers only the heavy end of Butler's family.
- Modern No. 20 → A fat face in the 19th-century British advertising tradition, sharing the heavy stems and hairline serifs that make Modern No. 20 read as a titling face. It pushes the contrast much further and is far bolder, so it suits headlines only where the original also worked at smaller sizes.
Display + body that work together
Quiet type that does the work
Crisp, even strokes give the display its punch. Quiet serifs underneath stay readable across thousands of words — used together by editors at the kind of paper that still prints corrections.
Display · Editorial Abril Fatface + Lora
A grammar of empty space
Body type does the heavy lifting. Get it right and the reader never thinks about it; get it wrong and they feel it before they can name what is off.
Display · Editorial Abril Fatface + Source Serif 4