Soho, a modern slab serif for the 21st century.

Soho is a strikingly modern typeface family. It is the new design by Sebastian Lester, a custom typeface designer at Monotype Imaging. “As a type designer I’m preoccupied with finding ways in which I can address modern problems like good legibility in modern media, and create fonts that work precisely and efficiently in the most technically demanding of corporate and publishing environments.” Lester certainly succeeded with his last commercial typefaces – Neo Sans and Neo Tech – which quickly became top sellers.

“It’s amazing in an age of so many typefaces that gaps and niches still exist in the market place” states Lester. One such gap, as he sees it, is in “multi-width slab serifs with fundamentally modern aesthetics” of which very few exist. It’s more amazing given the popularity of slab serifs in the last 4-5 years, with this sub-genre of the serif taking a firm hold in the realms of publishing and corporate identity.

There is something inherently strong, solid and reliable looking about a good slab serif. It’s not surprising they’ve enjoyed a renaissance in the past few years. Being closely related to sans serifs they tend to look more modern than other varieties of serif, and they’re very robust on screen. They can provide an interesting and viable alternative to the many large sans families today. Slab serifs can look super chic in lighter weights and super strong in heavier sizes.

In designing Soho, he set himself the rather lofty aspiration of designing the ‘ultimate’ slab serif. He wanted it to look fundamentally 21st century; supremely versatile with a weight, width and ‘tone of voice’ to meet the requirements of the most discerning of designers. He wanted something conservative enough to have versatility and endurance, but novel enough to capture the imagination of designers. It had to be distinctively different to the traditional 19th century model of slab serif design. He has achieved this with a contemporary serif structure, low contrast squarish shapes, a generous x-height and clipped serifs and terminals.

In addition, OpenType technology has allowed him to offer many useful features like ‘stylistic sets’ in which a wide variety of alternative characters can be introduced at the click of a mouse button giving one font several ‘tones of voice’ from conservative to cutting edge. As well as extended language coverage, ligatures and small caps.

Given that slab serifs are often used in headlines it makes sense to have a variety of widths and weights so that even the most demanding of designers can find the correct weight and width for their needs. Soho has 9 weights and 5 widths of precision engineered OpenType. That’s 40 fonts, 32,668 characters and 24 OpenType features; a culmination of nearly three years work.

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