Crimson Pro vs EB Garamond
Two serif faces, set live below in their own letters — then the honest take on which to pick and when.
The quick brown fox 0123456789
Georg Duffner, Octavio Pardo · 2011 · weights 400, 500, 600, 700, 800
At a glance
- Tradition
- Modern old-style redraw
- Faithful Garamond revival
- Feel
- Refined, contemporary
- Antique, classical
- Best for
- Books and articles
- Classical editorial
- Designer
- Jacques Le Bailly, 2018
- Georg Duffner, 2011
Crimson ProEB Garamond
The honest take
Two old-style book serifs for long-form reading, both in the Garamond-adjacent tradition. EB Garamond (Georg Duffner, 2011) is a faithful revival of Claude Garamont's sixteenth-century types, with classical proportions, a lower x-height and delicate detail that gives an authentically historical, book-like colour. Crimson Pro (Jacques Le Bailly, 2018) is a redraw of the earlier Crimson Text into a modern variable-friendly family: still an old-style text serif built for books and articles, but with cleaner, more consistent curves and a 400–700 range. Choose EB Garamond for the most historically faithful, elegant classical texture, best at generous sizes. Choose Crimson Pro for a similarly literary feel with slightly more contemporary polish and smoother screen rendering. Both make excellent essay and body serifs; EB Garamond is the more antique, Crimson Pro the more refined-modern.
The x-ray
Same size, same baseline — Crimson Pro over EB Garamond. Where they agree the strokes merge; where they argue, fringes.
“Hamburgefonstiv” is the type designer's test word — it carries most of the shapes that give a face away.
Read more
More about each face: Crimson Pro · EB Garamond