About the Font
Some Notes on Soho from the Designer Sebastian Lester:
“Soho™ represents nearly 3 years of work. 40 fonts. 3,000 hours. 32,668 characters.
I love slab serifs. For the uninititated, a slab serif is a subset of the modern serif, characterised primarily by thick and blocky serifs. There is something fundamentally robust, solid and reliable about this genre, which makes slab serif designs very useful for everything from publishing to corporate branding. How many companies don’t want to look robust, solid and reliable? They have the potential to look truly cutting-edge or solidly conservative. They can hold up well used on screen as well as print. They can provide an interesting and viable alternative to the many large sans families available today. They can look super-chic in lighter weights and super-strong in heavier sizes. It amazes me that they’re relatively unexplored as a genre at this point in time. Perhaps 60,000 fonts in circulation and only a small handful of multi-weight, multi-width slab serif designs exist at the moment, despite their popularity.
In designing Soho I set myself the rather lofty aspiration of designing the ‘ultimate’ slab serif. I wanted it to look fundamentally 21st century. I wanted it to be supremely versatile; a weight, width and ‘tone of voice’ to meet the requirements of even the most discerning of designers. I wanted something conservative enough to have that versatility and endurance, but novel enough to capture people’s imagination. It had to be distinctively different to the traditional 19th Century models of slab serif design. In concise terms I have tried to achieve this with a contemporary serif structure, low contrast squarish shapes, a generous x-height and clipped serifs and terminals. I took advantage of
OpenType technology to offer extensive language coverage, stylistic alternatives, ligatures and small caps.
It’s been a long, challenging and at times incredibly arduous task completing this family. I wanted to design something that people find useful in the broadest of contexts and continue to find useful as technologies and tastes shift and evolve. Even with fast computers and clever software this wasn’t going to happen over night. Only time will tell, but I hope I have struck the right balance. I hope that designers find Soho an appealing and useful tool.”
The following design examples show the unlimited possibilities that arise when Soho’s various weights and widths are combined.
