The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Clarendon vs Amazing Slab
A Victorian slab serif against a startup-era one. Clarendon, cut for London's Fann Street Foundry in 1845, is the original bracketed slab: vertical stress, ball terminals, and a sturdy bulk built for emphasis and poster work. Amazing Slab, released by Zetafonts in 2021, grafts Egyptian serifs onto the open, humanist shapes of the foundry's Amazing Grotesk, so it reads as a contemporary branding face rather than a revival.
Clarendon is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Roboto Slab, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Clarendon → Amazing Slab is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Bree Serif, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Amazing Slab →
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
- Clarendon's serifs are bracketed, curving into the stems, and its 'a' and 'c' end in ball terminals; Amazing Slab keeps the slabs low-contrast but finishes strokes with the curved endings and open apertures of a humanist sans.
- Clarendon's display weights are the ones most people know, from wood-type wanted posters to the 1953 Hermann Eidenbenz revival for Haas; Amazing Slab's heavy weights descend from Francesco Canovaro's StartupItalia logo lettering.
- Amazing Slab ships as 21 styles, with eight weights plus italics, four inline display cuts and a variable font, covering Latin, Cyrillic and Greek; the Linotype Clarendon family on MyFonts is five upright styles with no italic.
- Both are commercial: Clarendon LT sells from roughly $41 per style or about $198 for the family, while Amazing Slab's free download on DaFont is personal-use only and commercial licences come from Zetafonts, so licensing cost counts against either pick.
Clarendon
Reach for Clarendon when you want period authority and typographic heritage, such as editorial mastheads, signage, packaging with a Victorian or Americana flavour, or bold emphasis beside a classic text face.
Amazing Slab
Reach for Amazing Slab when you want a friendly, modern slab for startup branding, logos and headlines, and need italics, inline variants, a variable font or Cyrillic and Greek coverage.