Taca is a typeface built around a shape that Portuguese designer Rúben R Dias calls a “squircle” — neither square nor circle. We usually associate the rounded, convex box with the television screens of the 1960s and Aldo Novarese’s classic typeface, Eurostile. But whereas Eurostile is cold and machined, Taca is warm and rugged, as if it was molded from clay or carved from stone. Taca’s organic nature is also derived from another unique feature: rounded crotches at the right angles where perpendicular strokes meet. This subtle finish, along with blunt stroke endings, softens the otherwise rigid skeleton. With such a strong conceptual vision, Taca could be relegated to the bin of experimental designs, severely limited in their application. But that fate is usually born of a less experienced maker. As a teacher, designer, and letterpress printer, Dias is a type user, keenly aware of the functional requirements of good type. Taca is therefore not a slave to its concept, but a working font family, effective in various sizes and environments. Its lettershapes break away from the base shape whenever it makes sense for legibility, while still maintaining the flavor of the design as a whole. That said, a set of squircle-shaped alternates give the user the flexibility to get more stylized if the situation calls for it. Fitting to its functional aims, Taca has many of the features one expects of a proper text font: upper and lowercase figures, case-sensitive punctuation, and Extended Latin language support. The simplicity, openness, and squareness of Taca’s forms also make it an ideal design for the pixel grid of screen displays.

This typeface is extrapolated from the ‘We the People’ calligraphy of the handwritten US Constitution Preamble which employed a style based on German Text and Square Text exemplars from George Bickham’s penmanship copy-books, the most celebrated being The Universal Penman published in 1743. The original Constitution document was transcribed onto parchment by Jacob Shallus, a Pennsylvania Assistant Clerk, over a weekend in 1787. Shallus’s biographer, Arthur Plotnik (The Man Behind the Quill, 1987), notes that he was paid $30, a modest monthly wage at the time. He also suggests that the calligraphic headings, ‘We the People’ and ‘Article’, may have been inserted by Shallus’s 14 year old trainee son, Francis, “The manner in which the ‘Article’ headings are squeezed into the space Shallus allowed for them suggests a second hand—and perhaps not a very experienced one.” The unconventional backslant of the headings would seem to support this contention, and at the end of the document there is perhaps a novice’s inconsistency in the structure of the letter n between that used for ‘done’ and those used for ‘In Witness’. However, one has to admire the elegant swagger of the wavy t, h and l which the K-Type font extends to the b, f and k. Also, the simpler, Schwabacher-style W, an enlarged version of the lowercase w, is a little less flamboyant than the capital W from the German and Square texts in Bickham’s manuals. For designers using OpenType-aware applications, the typeface includes some Alternates, including a Bickham-style W, the letters t, h and n with added flourishes, two simpler forms of the A, and a few roman numerals for numbering articles. Also some ornamental flourishes and a round middle dot/decimal point. Punctuation marks are drawn in square, calligraphic style, but an alternative round period/full stop, for use with currency and numerals, is available at the period centered position (though placed on the baseline), accessed by Shift Option 9 on a Mac, or Alt 0183 on Windows. The full phrase, ‘We the People’, has been placed at the trademark keystroke and can be accessed by Option 2 (or Shift Option 2) on a Mac, or Alt 0153 on Windows. For designers who find the backslant awkward or unpleasant, the licensed typeface also includes two additional fonts which have a vertical aspect that may be more conducive to graphic design layouts. ‘We The People Upright’ and ‘We The People Upright Bold’ both retain the distinctive style, and the heavier weight is only slightly emboldened, just enough to add some punch.

C-V dashes are transcribed from 72-pt ornaments designed by Enric Crous-Vidal and issued by Typefoundry Amsterdam c. 1950.

Cross Stitch Delicate is based on upper case characters 21 stitches tall and contains the characters A-Z and numbers 0-9.