Trajan Alternatives

Yves Peters

Last edited October 26, 2016

It’s a well-known joke among designers: Trajan is the go-to typeface for promoting new movies. Carol Twombly’s beautiful digitization of the classic Roman lettering is seen on countless posters, billboards and ads — usually for films in the dramatic blockbuster category.

For the sake of typographic diversity, we present other inscriptional serifs that offer something different than Trajan, such as a lowercase, a brush construction, or a wider range of weights and widths.

$Math is easy, design is hard$

While designing Trajan, Carol Twombly was influenced by the style of carved letters produced by the Romans during the first century AD. Twombly completed the design, adding numerals and punctuation, as well as a bolder version to allow for text emphasis. Most importantly, her interpretation of the ancient style resulted in a font family whose clarity and beauty come across in modern printed... Read More

Pontif, Pietra and Cresci were developed from original manuscript and inscriptional research in Rome.

Pontif, Pietra and Cresci were developed from original manuscript and inscriptional research in Rome.

Pontif, Pietra and Cresci were developed from original manuscript and inscriptional research in Rome.

Stevens Titling takes the elegant inscriptional capitals back to their brush-painted roots, from precise and refined to strong and rough.

Stevens Titling™, a collaborative work of the both calligraphers John Stevens and Ryuichi Tateno, is a suite of four fonts: Sable Brush,... Read More

Based on Roman inscriptions, Monotype Classic Roman is a fineline face with beautifully proportioned letter forms.

Based on Roman inscriptions, Classic Roman is an all-capitals headline typeface with many similarities to Trajan. The Classic Roman font... Read More

French designer Albert Boton developed FF Tibere as a caps-only titling face for titles and headlines. During the process however he saw the potential for the design to be adapted to function in text too. So he reworked his drawings, focusing on versatility in form. FF Tibere gets its name from the Tiber river in Rome, home to the classical Roman inscriptional lettering that served as... Read More