Guanabara is the third release of Plau Type Foundry. It started from the need of a wayfinding typeface that had personality enough to be the brand typeface for a city. The city of Rio de Janeiro, with its never-ending curves and all year long summer weather provided the constraints and requirements of this typeface. From there, it evolved to be a workhorse, with 8 weights from Thin to Black and matching true italics. It just had to have the features that all us designers have grown to love, such as alternate letters (a, g and r for the romans), tabular and proportional figures in lining and oldstyle set-ups as well as small caps, fractions and all that jazz (I mean, samba). And it needed to be recognizable and distinct. For that, design features like tapered R legs, capitals with classic proportions and calligraphic finishes on the terminals proved crucial. And last, but not least, like Rio, it had to welcome many cultures. We came to think of it as the “Typeface from Ipanema”, with a classic, timeless look, swinging elegance and joyful attitude.

In August of 2009, I was commissioned by Zoo York, a New York City based skateboard company, to visit Buenos Aires to study and document street typography. As soon as my taxi driver took the bustling street Entre Ríos, it was clear that the city and I were going to be good friends. Many of the independently owned businesses on Entre Ríos are adorned with handmade signage. These signs are painted in a style called Fileteado which is a century-old Argentinian type of lettering and floral ornamentation. Nowadays, Fileteado is still a prominent part of the city’s landscape, coloring the façades of restaurants, bars and coffee shops. Calaveras and Diablitos are two new typefaces that were inspired by Fileteado. Stylistically, the fonts are a return to a rhythmic and playful sensibility reminiscent of Vitrina and Cuba, two fonts that I designed in 1996. Along with dynamism and dance, these new fonts incorporate a rigor and functionality essential to labelling any font a ‘workhorse.’ The names Calaveras and Diablitos, came from the name of a song by the infamous Buenos Aires rock band, Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. —Pablo A. Medina

In August of 2009, I was commissioned by Zoo York, a New York City based skateboard company, to visit Buenos Aires to study and document street typography. As soon as my taxi driver took the bustling street Entre Ríos, it was clear that the city and I were going to be good friends. Many of the independently owned businesses on Entre Ríos are adorned with handmade signage. These signs are painted in a style called Fileteado which is a century-old Argentinian type of lettering and floral ornamentation. Nowadays, Fileteado is still a prominent part of the city’s landscape, coloring the façades of restaurants, bars and coffee shops. Calaveras and Diablitos are two new typefaces that were inspired by Fileteado. Stylistically, the fonts are a return to a rhythmic and playful sensibility reminiscent of Vitrina and Cuba, two fonts that I designed in 1996. Along with dynamism and dance, these new fonts incorporate a rigor and functionality essential to labelling any font a ‘workhorse.’ The names Calaveras and Diablitos, came from the name of a song by the infamous Buenos Aires rock band, Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. —Pablo A. Medina

Drunk Cowboy is a bouncy version of the popular Old West type style, inspired by hand-made signage in Paducah, Kentucky. The strokes are loopy and loose. The exaggerated terminals give this font a loud, boisterous presence. Drunk Cowboy is a brutish rogue that emanates the fierce independence of Rio as played by Marlon Brando in One Eyed Jacks, but it is most like Paul Newman's Butch Cassidy—a mischievous wise-cracker. And there's gold worth mining for in this font. Dig deep enough and you'll find swash characters and special ligatures, like Th, ST, CT, NT and other popular letter combinations found in the Cowboy dialect.

Tita is dedicated to my grandmother Hebe, witty and arrabalera 1. The font is inspired by Milonga 2 music and the fileteado porteño 3. I picture it at The Moulin Rouge, sparkling, provocative, loving. It evokes Tita Merello and my grandmum singing her music. Tita is Argentinean to its very core. A font to shout goal and dulce de leche 4 with passion! Its curves originate from polirhythmic calligraphy, which I learnt from my mentor Silvia Cordero Vega. Tita is a pedigree script that is based on hand lettering and Sandra Biondi’s calligraphy works. Font digitalisation by Daniel Hernández. Edited by Javier Quintana / Programmed by Manuel Corradine. 1. A person from the arrabal (a working class neighborhood on the outskirts of the city of Buenos Aires) 2. Musical genre originated in the Río de la Plata areas of Argentina and Uruguay 3. Decorative hand lettering and artistic style that is frequently spotted in Buenos Aires 4. Sweet milk sauce

Daiquiri is a revival of a handlettered font in two weights, from an ad for Puerto Rico Rum dating back to the forties or fifties. I found the ad on a French antique market on my last visit for Mardi Gras in Nice. The ad read "Breeze through the heat, be a Daiquiri fan". That's why they had this "fan" in the illustration! Did they want you to rotate like a fan when you had enough Daiquiris? Or did they just do it for that little "Jeu des mots"? Anyway I found the handlettering very pretty, so I took those few letters and made a whole font out of them. I think Daiquiri has that touch that brings those happy and uncomplicated times back when advertising was still fun. I started something like 20 years later in advertising and things had gotten more stringent. We already had to satisfy those marketing guys with their scholarly attitude. They have taken all the fun out of the job, for the creators as well as for the consumers. I would like to see more uncomplicated ads like this again, yours Gert Wiescher

Oscar Niemeyer is one of the greatest architects of our time—his unique way of mixing straight lines and abstract curves gives rise to an unmistakable and characteristic style. This typeface is my own tribute to Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. The design process started when my wife and I visited Brazil while she was running a series of workshops on calligraphy. In my spare time, I would walk through the streets of beautiful cities like Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo, enjoying the local architecture and urban life. I had also the opportunity to attend to some of the workshops during which I was able to observe the organic of calligraphy and people. Then, I started to draw some shapes that reflected everything about this beautiful place: Niemeyer’s architecture and work and, in his own words ‘the curves on the body of the beloved woman’. This versatile typeface comes in 8 weights with matching italics, alternative characters, oldstyle figures and much more! Niemeyer is well-suited for logotypes, advertising, publishing, branding and corporate use. Special thanks to everyone in the Latinotype Team (especially to César Araya) for their support, help with corrections and digital editing.

Acarau is a 6 fonts display typeface with high reverse contrast—since from Roman capitals and calligraphy, usually Latin alphabet letters have thiner horizontal steams and thicker verticals, these features being optical or visual—quite adequate for logos, headlines and posters. Moreover, the style of the typeface is inspired by Italics form factor: lowercase letters having less strokes to make their shapes; A has one story; E has one stroke shape, such as K, G, Y and Z; F has a descent. To give it more calligraphic feeling, there is contrast for uppercases as well, this is very perceived by the diagonal letters like A, K, M, N, V, W, X, Y and Z. J also has a descent. Q and R have natural swashes, but they have alternates in case the costumer want to go for more usual forms—including accent marked letters. Acarau is a 12 months project, the contrast for uppercases were increasing as the process was made. In the middle it is found suitable blend the letter shapes with the history of Brazilian music from the 70’s and 80’s, since the font has a tropical, warm, spicy and nostalgic feeling. Songs from bands and singers that emerged on Rio de Janeiro like Paralamas do Sucesso, Cazuza, Lulu Santos and Kid Abelha bring the beach accent and rhythm that this font has. OpenType features complement the set, which has Multi-Lingual support for a comprehensive Latin set, including Vietnamese—meaning more than 640 glyphs: Case-Sensitive forms, so symbols can properly align to uppercase letters; Ligatures, to better reading for z_y and L_I, and style for s_s, w_w_w; also for ease arrows and punctuation typing; Stylistic Set 1: two story a—including accent marked letters; Stylistic Set 2: two story g—including accent marked letters; Stylistic Set 3: diagonal (usual) z—including accent marked letters; Stylistic Set 4: flower i and j dots; Contextual alternates; Terminal forms, for R and Q; Ordinals.