The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Free font
Zilla Slab
A free alternative to Archer.
About Zilla Slab
Zilla Slab is the typeface Mozilla commissioned from Typotheque in 2017 as its brand face. The six-weight slab serif is built on smooth, geometric-adjacent curves with rounded interiors and bracketed slabs, giving it a contemporary personality that is quietly quirky rather than severe.
It descends from the nineteenth-century slab tradition Clarendon established, but the cut is sharper and more modern, so it reads as a successor rather than a revival. Its even color and rounded interiors get closest to Archer's polished editorial feel in running text, and the gentle Egyptian detailing stands in convincingly for Guardian Headline's soft slabbed terminals at display sizes — friendly where those faces are more mechanical. In tech branding it captures Recoleta's soft semi-slab character with a more structured backbone. Available on Google Fonts, it works best where a slab needs to feel approachable and deliberately designed.
- Designer
- Typotheque
- Released
- 2017
- Available at
- Google Fonts →
Zilla Slab is also a free alternative to…
- Archer → Commissioned by Mozilla, built on smooth geometric-adjacent curves with a contemporary, slightly quirky personality. Its rounded interiors and even color get closest to Archer's polished editorial feel in running text.
- Clarendon → Mozilla commissioned Zilla Slab from Typotheque, drawing on the same nineteenth-century slab tradition Clarendon set. Six weights, a sharper contemporary cut, and bracketed slabs that read as a direct descendant rather than a copy.
- Guardian Headline → Mozilla's commissioned slab has rounded, gentle details on an Egyptian skeleton — a good stand-in for Guardian Headline's soft slabbed terminals at display sizes, with a friendly rather than mechanical voice.
- Recoleta → Mozilla's brand slab — friendly, geometric, gently rounded slab serifs that capture Recoleta's soft-semi-slab character in a tech-branding context.
- Amazing Slab → Typotheque's slab for Mozilla, derived from Tesla, with smooth curves and a contemporary humanist structure rather than Victorian stiffness. It matches Amazing Slab's tech-brand positioning and offers five weights with italics, but its proportions are more condensed and its slabs crisper and less rounded.
- Bodoni Egyptian Pro → Typotheque's slab for Mozilla keeps contrast low and serifs even across five weights with true italics, so it covers the same text-to-display duties. Its forms derive from Tesla with a slightly compressed, modern bracket rather than Bodoni's open round bowls, giving it a cooler, more corporate tone.
- Breton → Typotheque's slab for Mozilla shares Breton's low contrast and crisp unbracketed serifs, with five weights and true italics for a fuller family. Its letters are drawn with softer, more oval curves and even widths, giving it a friendlier, more text-oriented tone than Breton's circle-driven display character.
- Bitstream Vera Serif → Mozilla's slab serif captures the chunky, bracketed-serif character that makes Vera Serif read like a slab on screen, and it was likewise built with open-source software in mind. It is narrower and more geometric, with a stronger personality that suits headings over long body copy.
- DejaVu Serif → Mozilla's slab serif is low-contrast and solidly built, so its text colour sits close to DejaVu Serif's heavy serifs. It is narrower and has smoother, more rounded joins and a softer personality, trading DejaVu's plain technical look for a friendlier branded voice.
Display + body that work together
Quiet type that does the work
Crisp, even strokes give the display its punch. Quiet serifs underneath stay readable across thousands of words — used together by editors at the kind of paper that still prints corrections.
Slab · Editorial Zilla Slab + Crimson Pro
Headlines that read at a glance
Two thousand years of letterforms boil down to a handful of decisions — width, weight, proportion. Pick a pair you trust, and let the rest take care of itself.
Display · Body Bodoni Moda + Zilla Slab