Crimson Text
Type with Purpose
Good typography guides attention, improves understanding, and makes communication effortless.
The Anatomy of a Typeface
By FontSide · June 2026
Every typeface is a system of decisions — about stroke contrast, x-height, spacing, and rhythm. The best ones feel invisible: you stop seeing the letters and start hearing the voice behind them. That transparency is the hardest thing to design.
A high x-height opens up the counters and makes small text breathe. Tight tracking pulls a headline together; loose tracking gives a caption room to exhale. None of these choices are accidents — they are arguments about how reading should feel.
Uppercase
Lowercase
Numerals
Symbols
Configuration
Select the weights and styles you want to include in your project.
Weights
Styles
Package Manager
The recommended way to use fonts in modern web projects.
1. Install Package
pnpm add @fontsource/crimson-text 2. Import in App
// Please select at least one weight and style 3. CSS Usage
body {
font-family: "Crimson Text", serif;
} Google Fonts CDN
Use Google's CDN to embed the fonts directly via HTML.
HTML <head>
<!-- Please select at least one weight and style --> Fontsource CDN
Skip the build step by adding this directly to your global CSS file.
Global CSS
/* Please select at least one weight and style */ Background & Story
Crimson Text is a font family for book production in the tradition of beautiful oldstyle typefaces.
There are a lot of great free fonts around, but one kind is missing: those Garamond-inspired types with all the little niceties like oldstyle figures, small caps, fleurons, math characters and the like. In fact, a lot of time is spend developing free knock-offs of ugly "standards" like Times and Helvetica.
Crimson Text is inspired by the fantastic work of people like Jan Tschichold, Robert Slimbach and Jonathan Hoefler. We hope that the free type community will one day be able to enjoy Crimson Text as a beautiful workhorse.
Several important bug fixes have been brought in March 2022, including the harmonisation of the line-spacing across all styles.
To contribute, see github.com/googlefonts/Crimson.
Tags & Moods
Subsets
Install
pnpm add @fontsource/crimson-text Designed by
Sebastian Kosch
Links
License
OFL-1.1