EB Garamond vs Lora
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
- Heritage
- 16th-century Garamond revival
- Modern brushed text serif
- x-height
- Lower, classical
- Taller, screen-friendly
- Best medium
- Print, large sizes
- Screens, all sizes
- Designer
- Georg Duffner, 2011
- Olga Karpushina, 2011
EB GaramondLora
The honest take
Two body serifs with different heritage and screen behaviour. EB Garamond (Georg Duffner, 2011) is a faithful revival of Claude Garamont's sixteenth-century types: genuinely classical proportions, delicate detail and a lower x-height that gives text an elegant, historical, book-like colour — beautiful in print and at generous sizes, but a touch fine at small screen sizes. Lora (Olga Karpushina, 2011) is a modern text serif with a taller x-height and moderate contrast, drawn to stay crisp on screens across sizes. Choose EB Garamond for literary, editorial or classical typography where the old-style elegance is the point and sizes run large. Choose Lora for robust, screen-first body text that needs to read cleanly at 16px on any device. EB Garamond is the more historical and refined; Lora the more dependable on screen.
The x-ray
Same size, same baseline — EB Garamond over Lora. 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: EB Garamond · Lora