Arby's Sauce Fonts: Saucy_AF and Fancy_AF
Moxie work for Arby's Restaurants | May 16, 2018 (Saucy_AF) and May 16, 2019 (Fancy_AF)
GOLD ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Art Direction (for Saucy_AF)
SILVER ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Innovative Use of Technology (for Saucy_AF)
BRONZE ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Branded Content (for Saucy_AF)
2018: Saucy_AF
Yes, I was really allowed to design and name a font "Saucy_AF" in 2018, and follow it up with a second, more decorative font named "Fancy_AF" in 2019.
The "AF" (of course) means, "Arby's Font" or, "Arby's Foundry" if you prefer.
As a joke in 2018, we created a post that read, "Our New Year's resolution is the same as last year" with an image I drew in Arby's Sauce that said "1200x1200 / 72 ppi." It was a design joke referring to the dimensions of our standard social posts, but it kicked off a slew of comments asking if Arby's would make a typeface based on my Sauce Writing. Which is really funny to me, because there's no set "font" I base it on. It's literally, "start writing and see what happens." When we did our next round of ideation, I suggested we follow through with the requests and make a font.
When Arby's agreed, we decided to start simple. Saucy_AF is an all-uppercase font plus numerals and all of the diactritical marks and special characters to make it a usable font. I had a full character sheet next to me as I worked, and crossed off each character as I drew and photographed it. After we had the full set, Jen delivered the images to her friend Danny Hong; who had made TrueType and OpenType fonts for Moxie before. It's Danny's screen-recordings you see in the videos tracing each of the letters and vectorizing them.
We won three Atlanta Ad Club Addy Awards for Saucy_AF, and the award submission copy has been adapted below.
Ever take a good look at the inside of a Classic Roast Beef or Beef 'N Cheddar wrapper? There's a "brick" pattern imprinted on it, and that made a perfect lined sheet for me to slide under the tray liner sheets to make sure all of the characters were the same height.
2019: The Sequel, Fancy_AF
Because Saucy_AF lacked lowercase letters, it gave us the chance to go back to the drawing board in 2019 and create Saucy's swishy sister, "Fancy_AF"—an OpenType font with multiple Swash capitals and a full set of lowercase letters that work with either font.
Want to download the fonts? You can find them on arbys.com.
“Feeling a bit saucy? There’s a font for that.”
- Ad Age
“Stand aside Google, YouTube, Airbnb, Coca-Cola, and Netflix. Stand aside everyone, I guess. Because Arby’s has its own custom font now, too.”
- Fast Company
“Described as “the ink of the sandwich world,” Arby’s is positioning Saucy_AF™ as an alternative to those who lack the skills to write in sauce like the folks behind the very social media savvy Arby’s Twitter account.”
- The Verge
The Reason
Arby’s fans think it’s cool that Aryb's writes with sauce in their social media content. So cool in fact, they received several requests from their Twitter followers to help them create similarly saucy messages.
The Insight
Fans wanted a way to mimic Arby's celebrated writing style, so all we needed to do was make it easy for them to create their own messages and notes in our signature style.
In 2018, the quickest way to deliver this while offering the most creative freedom was clear: a free, custom font.
The Strategy
No matter the message, Arby’s can make it better with sauce.
Arby’s would put in the work to create our very own sauce font– a QSR first– and make it readily available for download and use by fans and followers everywhere.
The Execution
We set out to create a proprietary Arby’s sauce font, Saucy_AF (AF = Arby’s Font), then place it on public sites via simple download links.
We wrote out the entire alphabet in sauce, then rasterized and digitized the whole set.
The resulting font is perfect for any occasion – especially when you’re feeling a bit saucy.
The Arby’s Sauce font is available for download on the Arby's website and on MyFonts.com. This font was then regularly used by Arby's followers and within our own social creative (alongside papercraft and food craft).
The Results
In an era where most companies are wary of inviting open creativity from its social-savvy base, Arby’s dared to offer a unique creative asset to anyone and everyone. This led to an overall boost in goodwill– with zero backlash, controversy or negativity!
As of the writing of the Addy's entries in 2018, there had been 7406 unique downloads of the font.
The client measured success based on engagement (downloads) and by write ups. Many different news outlets featured articles featuring the Sauce Font.
The Team
Jennifer Barclay - Creative Director
Scott Hunt - Art Director, Photographer, Sauce Artist
Hughston May - Graphic Designer
Brandon Kraemer - Copywriter (for Saucy_AF)
Orin Heidelberg - Copywriter (for Fancy_AF)
Danny Hong - Digitizer / Font Creator
Kirsten Thieman - BTS Photographer
Wanna find me elsewhere?
You'll get bored quickly... it's a lot of photos of my adorable husband, our kids and our rescue dog, Porter.
