My ( all time ) favourite slab serif would be ’Farao’, by František Štorm
( One looovely type face )

Dav

Oxtail from Psyops is nice too.

http://www.psyops.com/html/spec_oxtail.html

Or Rosewood fill, which is massively overused.

There’s also TheSerif from Thesis but that’s very similar to Caecilia.

Maybe less human than Caecilia is Silica by Sumner Stone. But this is my personal all-time favourite slab serif.

Jürgen Weltin

Freight Micro is very playful and human. Maybe you’re looking for something like this?

hmm, thanks for your help. i have some ideas for an experiment, and i know how i want the face to feel, but im not totally convinced by my aesthetic idea.. thats why i asked here, to find a direction to take.

all five fonts named here helped me, so any other will do it, too.

(im still also interested in the historical question i asked)

Adobe’s Chaparrel, as recently blogged by Tom Phinney just about defines ’coltish’ in typeface terms.

is this quote is correct?

Yes. But slab serif faces were used for display settings, or as a contrast face in text, rather than the main style. Like we use a bold sans to contrast a regular serif face today.

The only form of contrast that Morris tolerated was between caps and U&lc — had he addrressed typography earlier in his career, or lived longer, he might have developed a larger palette of typefaces and started to use them together.

oh yes, i’d only use the resulting font in a display context.. thanks tough for your explanation, and if you’d like to add anything more, feel free :)

Fontsmith’s FS Clerkenwell may be of interest.

Slab serifs as text typefaces are an end-of-the-19th-century innovation. Although Morris wouldn’t have thought much of the slab serifs you name, it’s arguable that his Kelmscott Chaucer typeface is a slab serif. ITC Italia is a modern slab-serif which is a reasonably direct descendant from Morris’ work, btw (being based on a rip-off of Morris overseen by a distant relative of mine).

T

I instantly thought of Chaparrel as well. Beautiful typeface with full complement of oldstyle numerals and ligatures, and sets nicely at body text sizes.

thanks again for all your help. thomas phinney, it seems you know a lot about his faces! i couldnt find a really high-res-version of any of his books, do you know a link by chance? i was never able to really have a good look at the body text face.

i did this research because im doing a collaboration with a friend of mine. we gave a quote to each other and have to interpret it with a own font - just the glyphs you need to write the quote. i got one by william morris (“give me love and work; these two only.”). i ended up with a geometrical slab serif with very thing, coltish serifs - but im totally unsure if i get two pass the gap between “industrial” and “geometrical” (i want to do a modern interpretation, and modern in an industrial sense for me means geometrical).

but all the inspiration you gave me here helped me, it wasnt for nothing. thanks again! (and if anyone wants to add anything, do so! please!)

Sorry to resurect this thread, but I was looking for something like Caecilia, but with a little a little more character and variation, and found Dalton Maag’s Lexia... very nice slab, with a number of slab free lc characters. I originally found it being used in the Marks & Spencers “Your M&S” magazine as sub heads.