serif

Cormorant

Cormorant was designed by Christian Thalmann at Catharsis Fonts and published in 2015. The design is inspired by the work of Claude Garamond and Robert Granjon, but is not a revival in any strict sense — it is a contemporary interpretation that takes the high contrast and calligraphic energy of the sixteenth-century French old-style tradition and amplifies them toward display use. The full Cormorant family includes several optical variants: the base roman and italic, Cormorant Infant (designed for smaller text sizes with simplified letterforms), Cormorant SC (small-capitals cut), and Cormorant Unicase. This makes Cormorant unusual among open-source serifs in offering purpose-drawn optical variants rather than simply scaling a single design. Five weights are available, with italic throughout. Given the extreme contrast and the decorative refinement of the letterforms, Cormorant performs best at large display sizes — magazine mastheads, book covers, luxury editorial — and is not intended as a body text face.