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. I hope that the free type community will one day be able to enjoy Crimson Text as a beautiful workhorse.
A word of warning: Crimson Text is under heavy development, and the spacing/kerning is abysmal. If you use it in public these days, you'll likely embarass yourself.
There are three downloads at this point. If you're having trouble with any one of them, email me and I'll fix it. Thanks.
Latest Release: All six weights, OpenType format. Updated once in a while; available on SourceForge.
Specimen: A PDF presenting the current development.
Nightly/SVN: Usually the latest development. The link takes you to the SVN tree on SourceForge, where you can get tarballs of everything, including the sources.
Latest Release – 380 KB (31 Aug 2010)
Specimen – 50 KB (12 Aug 2010)
Subversion Trunk – on SourceForge.net
I welcome every support with open arms! Here's how you can help.
Emails: This is crucial. Really. I have no design education, and when you stare at letters for too long, you lose track of what looks out of whack and what doesn't. Whatever your thoughts, please let me know.
Outlines: If you rock at FontForge, have time, and a thing for type, drop me a line. I'll tell you how to use Subversion, and you can draw some letters, symbols, or whatever other awesomeness comes to mind.
Money: If you're using Crimson Text commercially, please consider a donation. Or support your favorite cause and let me know you did.
Here's my long-term roadmap for Crimson development:
Hi. My name is Sebastian Kosch. I'm - years -. I grew up in Europe near Cologne. I'm in love with typography and free software (among other things, of course).
I moved to Toronto in 2009 to study Engineering Science.
You can reach me at firstname@thisdomain.
Crimson Text is published under the terms of SIL's Open Font License. That means:
The rest of the website is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.