Serifa is a
slab serif
In typography, a slab serif (also called ''mechanistic'', ''square serif'', ''antique'' or ''Egyptian'') typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular ( Rockwell), ...
typeface family created by
Adrian Frutiger
Adrian Johann Frutiger (; 24 May 1928 – 10 September 2015) was a Swiss typeface designer who influenced the direction of type design in the second half of the 20th century. His career spanned the hot metal, phototypesetting and digital ...
in 1967. The typeface is based on the
Univers
Univers () is a sans-serif typeface family designed by Adrian Frutiger and released by his employer Deberny & Peignot in 1957. Classified as a Grotesque (typeface classification), neo-grotesque sans-serif, one based on the model of nineteenth-cen ...
family.
Usage
It was most prominently featured in the logo of
Montgomery Ward
Montgomery Ward is the name of two successive U.S. retail corporations. The original Montgomery Ward & Co. was a mail-order business and later a department store chain that operated between 1872 and 2001; its common nickname was "Monkey Wards". ...
from 1982 to 1992 and again in the revived online store. It was also used in the campaign ads for
Ross Perot
Henry Ross Perot ( ; June 27, 1930 – July 9, 2019) was an American businessman, politician, and philanthropist. He was the founder and chief executive officer of Electronic Data Systems and Perot Systems. He ran an Independent politician ...
's
1992 Presidential campaign and from 1982 to late 1987 on the graphics of various
CBS News
CBS News is the news division of the American television and radio broadcaster CBS. It is headquartered in New York City. CBS News television programs include ''CBS Evening News'', ''CBS Mornings'', news magazine programs ''CBS News Sunday Morn ...
programming, and for the local news programs at the CBS
owned-and-operated television stations (as well as several affiliates).
In 2014 Jake Tilson used it in the NT signage to complement the NT logo.
Serifa is also used in nearly all of the
College Board's communications and exams.
Related fonts
* Glypha, a variation of Serifa by Frutiger in 1980, is narrower and has a larger
x-height
upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography
In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the le ...
.
* DilleniaUPC, a
Thai typeface
Thai typography concerns the representation of the Thai script in print and on displays, and dates to the earliest printed Thai text in 1819. The printing press was introduced by Western missionaries during the mid-nineteenth century, and the pri ...
that
comes preinstalled with
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
, contains Latin glyphs which are identical to those of Serifa, except that those of DilleniaUPC have less width (
condensed) compared to those of Serifa.
* Hepta Slab is a
free and open-source
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...
font that is quite similar to Serifa.
[{{cite web, title=Hepta Slab - Google Fonts, url=https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Hepta+Slab , website=fonts.google.com, access-date=1 September 2024]
References
Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1964
Typefaces designed by Adrian Frutiger
Slab serif typefaces