Life Savers

Try Life Savers

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Life Savers Regular
• Bold 700Life Savers Bold
• ExtraBold 800Life Savers ExtraBold

About Life Savers

Life Savers is a display typeface with thin slab serifs, round ball terminals and tall, narrow capitals. Its source, according to the official notes, is the hand-drawn lettering of 1950s advertisements for Life Savers candy, a style that mixed typewriter forms with a geometric slab serif; the notes add that the original lettering was probably the work of Frazier Purdy at the Sam Marsh Studio. In the specimen the lowercase is small beside the capitals, the a, c, f and r end in dots, and strokes stay almost uniform in the Regular. The family has three static weights, Regular 400, Bold 700 and ExtraBold 800, without italics, and is not a variable font. Each font holds 470 glyphs for the Latin and Latin Extended character sets. Impallari Type is credited for the design, published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Life Savers works

Confectionery and food packaging

The lettering descends from candy adverts, and the ball terminals and curled serifs carry that sweet-shop tone onto labels and wrappers.

Retro headlines

Regular gives a fine-line headline; Bold and ExtraBold keep the same skeleton when a title needs more ink.

Menus and café boards

Tall capitals over a small lowercase set dish names and section titles in a mid-century advertising voice.

Cards and party invitations

A short line in the thin Regular reads as careful hand lettering on greeting cards and informal invitations.

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

Character sets found in the files: latin, latin-ext. 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 Life Savers

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 Life Savers 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: "Life Savers";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/LifeSavers-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Life Savers";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/LifeSavers-ExtraBold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 800;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Life Savers";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/LifeSavers-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Life Savers", sans-serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Life Savers 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=Life+Savers:wght@400;700;800&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Weights jump from 400 to 700

There is no Medium or SemiBold. The styles are Regular 400, Bold 700 and ExtraBold 800.

No italics

Life Savers has upright styles only.

The Regular is nearly a hairline

Strokes in the Regular are very thin in the specimen, so small sizes and low-contrast backgrounds call for Bold or ExtraBold.

FAQs

Collections with Life Savers

• Fonts for packaging and product labels

  Brush scripts, soft serifs and sturdy display faces for jars, boxes, bottles and tags, where a name has to work on a small curved surface.

• Mid-century display fonts from the 1950s to the 1970s

  Bouncing, hand-lettered display faces after post-war advertising, cartoons, motel signs and record covers.

Similar fonts

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