As of late, more and more ads have featured one peculiarly common thing: slab serifs. At the most basic level, slab serifs are serif typefaces that are typically thick and block-like. Some famous examples include Rockwell (championed by long-time Rockwell user Burger King), Clarendon and Courier, a font that comes standard on most computers. Today, we’ll look at advertising that uses Rockwell and two of our other favorite slab serif fonts.

Burger King has been using Rockwell ever since I was a kid, but as a better reference, we can just say that they’ve been using Rockwell throughout most of the Burger King Kid’s Club era (remember those commercials?). Blog Desedo.com says Burger King’s been using Rockwell since 1995.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky has also done a fine job of utilizing Burger King’s long-standing Rockwell love throughout Burger King’s website.

Group Health has also joined the Rockwell fan club with their new ad campaign and commercials.

So although we may be a little sans serif around here, we do pay attention to what’s out there and our creative team still has a huge affinity for serif typefaces. We ourselves have used Rockwell in dozens of client pieces.

Here are two of our favorite slab serifs (other than Rockwell) that our team absolutely adores.

The unanimous slab serif favorite among our creative team is Serifa. With six different weights, Serifa was developed by a Swiss designer named Adrian Frutiger in 1964, based on the Univers sans serif family. We love Serifa because it’s highly versatile, elegant, whimsical, easy on the eyes and fun. In other words, it’s a font that has all the right traits you’d hope for in a blind date.

Another favorite is a newcomer called Adelle. With double the weights of Serifa, this twelve-weight font is commonly used in magazines and newspapers for its versatility and legibility as both a heading and subheading. Created by designers Veronika Burian and José Scaglione, Adelle is another fun, energetic font that also doubles as an unobtrusive guest in newspaper columns when used in the “light” un-bolded style.

Still hungry for slab serifs? Check the linotype.com page for a more in-depth look at slab serifs and its typography history. We’ll post more on typography in the near future.

About the Author

Lisa Marketing and Sales

Filed under: Design, Things We Love

Tags: Design, Eben Design, Things We Love Thursdays, Typography