Rafael Jordán Oliver is a graphic designer and typographer from Valencia, Spain. While studying for his degree in graphic design at EASD Valencia, he discovered a passion for typography. The art of type design is one he learned largely on his own through independent study, attending workshops on the subject, and by reading every single book on type design and calligraphy that he could get his hands on.
His first font was developed in 2013 and it changed the course of his entire career. He stepped away from his work as a graphic designer in favor of attending the first edition of the Type@Paris program.
These days, Rafael works as a freelance type designer and is part of Cañas & Tipos, an organization that’s dedicated to promoting typographic culture in Valencia. Rafael has also participated in talks, workshops, and masterclasses where he shares his own education and experience working in type design, typography, and lettering.
His first release through YouWorkForThem is Brava Slab, a slab serif family designed specifically with editorial purposes in mind. This slab serif carries a familiar monoline appearance that’s softened by its humanist construction, making this a friendlier version of the traditional editorial slab serif. Brava Slab is warm yet impactful, conveying messages with clarity, strength, and approachability.
Its personality makes it ideal for editorial and publishing applications of all kinds, yet it’s equally well suited to branding and identity projects. Brava Slab is available in ExtraLight, Light, Regular, SemiBold, Bold, and ExtraBold, with corresponding true italics for each. This range of weights allows Brava Slab to work beautifully in everything from headlines and editorials to displays, signage, posters, book covers, digital and print publishing, web copy, corporate correspondence, white papers, infographics, presentations, branding, identity, product packaging, and any design project that needs a well built slab serif.
Speaking of being well built, Brava Slab offers a host of additional features through OpenType, including case sensitive forms, discretionary ligatures, standard ligatures, numerators, denominators, fractions, capitals to small caps, slashed zero, tabular figures, oldstyle figures, lining figures, subscript, superscript, scientific inferiors, contextual alternates, stylistic alternates, and small caps for incredible versatility.
Brava Slab’s multilingual support is extensive, as well, covering Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Dutch, Afrikaans, and Igbo Onwu for fantastic accessibility in projects aimed at an international market.
Rafael Jordán Oliver currently offers just one product through YouWorkForThem but given his work with Brava Slab, we’re really looking forward to seeing more of his type designs in the future. If you love Brava Slab as much as we do, visit and bookmark his portfolio so you can check back often for new releases!
