The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Free font
Crimson Text
A free oldstyle book serif by Sebastian Kosch, inspired by Sabon, Minion and Hoefler Text, licensed under the OFL.
About Crimson Text
Crimson Text is an oldstyle serif released in 2010 by Sebastian Kosch and licensed under the SIL Open Font License. Kosch drew it as a free workhorse for book production, looking to Jan Tschichold's Sabon, Robert Slimbach's Arno and Minion, and Jonathan Hoefler's Hoefler Text rather than to any single historical model. The result is a Garalde with moderate contrast, modest x-height, bracketed serifs and a calm, even texture at text sizes. The family comes in Regular, Semibold and Bold with italics, and includes oldstyle figures, small caps and math characters. A 2012 revision corrected outlines and spacing; Google later commissioned Crimson Pro as a separate professional redesign.
Use Crimson Text for long-form reading: book interiors, essays, academic pages, literary blogs and any layout that wants the quiet authority of a Renaissance text face. It pairs naturally with a plain humanist sans for navigation and captions. In practice it stands in for Adobe's Minion Pro and, more loosely, for Sabon and Arno, giving a similar warm scholarly tone without a license fee.
- Designer
- Sebastian Kosch
- Released
- 2010
- Available at
- Google Fonts →
Display + body that work together
A grammar of empty space
Two thousand years of letterforms boil down to a handful of decisions — width, weight, proportion. Pick a pair you trust, and let the rest take care of itself.
Editorial · Modern Crimson Text + Inter
Letters that hold their nerve
The display sets the register; the body follows through. When both halves of a pair pull in the same direction, the design disappears and the words come forward.
Modern · Editorial Archivo + Crimson Text