Cinzel
Natanael GamaSphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Display · Variable · 6 weights · OFL · Türkçe
Free Trajan alternatives
Carol Twombly for Adobe, 1989, drawn from the inscription at the base of the Trajan column in Rome.
Why people look for a Trajan alternative
Trajan is drawn from the inscription at the base of Trajan's Column and has been the typeface of film posters and law firms for forty years. It is licensed through Adobe, it is capitals only, and its authority comes from proportions that a substitute either has or does not.
What a Trajan substitute has to get right
Capitals only. There is no lowercase in the source and a substitute that supplies one is answering a different question — the closest thing to a Trajan lowercase is a set of small capitals.
The one in this archive
One entry, because one is the honest answer. A face is listed here only if the substitution would survive a designer looking at both.
Trajan and its free alternatives, at a glance
- How you get it
- Bought from a foundry under a commercial licence
- Pass it on, embed it or self-host it
- Only as the licence you bought allows
- On a website
- Usually a separate web licence on top
Trajan
| Property | Cinzel |
|---|---|
| Licence | OFL-1.1 — free, commercial use allowed |
| Weights | 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900 |
| Variable | Yes |
| Italic | No |
| Türkçe | Yes |
| Other alphabets | Latin only |
| Glyphs | 548 |
| Web font | 47 KB |
Questions
- What is the best free alternative to Trajan?
- Cinzel — it is the closest match in this archive, and the page above says which shapes the substitution turns on. It is the only one listed, because one honest match is a better answer than a longer list of near misses.
- Are these Trajan alternatives free for commercial use?
- Yes. Every font on this site is under a licence that permits commercial use with no fee and no attribution requirement, mostly the SIL Open Font License. That covers paid client work, products you sell, self-hosting on a website, and embedding in an application. The licence file is inside every download.
- Can I use a Trajan alternative in a logo?
- Yes. An open font licence covers the font software rather than the shapes you set with it, so a logo made with one of these can be trademarked like any other. What you cannot do is claim rights over the typeface itself.
- Will a Trajan substitute keep my layout the same?
- Only if it is metrically compatible — drawn so every character occupies the same width as the original, which makes a document reflow identically. Very few faces are, and where one is, this site says so on its page. Everything else will look similar and set differently, so a layout built to the original's widths needs checking rather than assuming.