Alfa Slab One

Try Alfa Slab One

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Alfa Slab One Regular

About Alfa Slab One

Alfa Slab One is a display typeface in the Egyptian, or slab serif, tradition, pushed to a very heavy weight. Stems are so thick that the counters of a, e and B shrink to small openings, and the rectangular serifs are nearly as heavy as the stems they sit on. The official description says the design started from Robert Thorne's Six-lines Pica Egyptian, made for the Thorowgood Foundry, and departs from it with heavier stems, bigger serifs and more contrast. The font has one style. Its file reports weight 400, Regular, even though the letters are as dark as a black weight; there is no lighter cut or italic. The 731 glyphs cover Latin, Latin Extended and Vietnamese. JM Solé is credited as designer, and the copyright notice reserves the font name Alfa Slab. The license is the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Alfa Slab One works

Poster headlines

Extreme stem weight and block serifs fill a line with black, so two or three words can anchor a whole poster.

Shop signs and window lettering

Heavy slab serifs keep their shape when cut large in vinyl or painted, in the manner of the Egyptian faces the design starts from.

Packaging and labels

A short product name in Alfa Slab One stays dominant even on a crowded label.

Sports and event graphics

Numerals are as heavy as the letters, which suits scores, dates and big figures.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Turkish
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Romanian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Estonian
• Vietnamese

Character sets found in the files: latin, latin-ext, vietnamese. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with Alfa Slab One

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use Alfa Slab One on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Alfa Slab One";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/AlfaSlabOne-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Alfa Slab One", sans-serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Alfa Slab One with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Alfa+Slab+One&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Labelled Regular, drawn black

The only file is Regular 400. Asking for bold in software produces a synthetic thickening of an already very heavy face.

Counters are small

The openings inside a, e, g and 8 are tiny in the specimen and close up further as the size drops.

Reserved font name

The copyright notice reserves the name Alfa Slab; modified versions need another name unless permission is given.

FAQs

Collections with Alfa Slab One

• Bold fonts for posters and big headlines

  Heavy and condensed open-license display fonts that hold a sheet from across the room: gothics, slabs, fat faces and stencils.

• Bold vintage fonts for poster design

  Wood-type slabs, Tuscans, fat faces and worn display fonts for posters that should look printed a century ago.

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All display fonts