Caacupe One

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Set in Caacupe One itself, from the preview the app ships.

Caacupé is a condensed, heavy display typeface rooted in the street lettering of Villa 21-24, one of the largest villas, or working-class urban neighborhoods, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and home to a large Paraguayan community.

The typeface began in 2014 as a piece of field research rather than a commission. Instead of asking how type should look for such a neighborhood, the project asked what its visual language already was. The answer was on its walls: hand-painted, brush-lettered shop signs, where letters work as images before they work as text, and where a message has to catch the eye at a glance to exist at all. A parallel study of the newspapers circulating in the area found the opposite: publications set in technically correct but culturally distant typefaces, designed for the neighborhood rather than from within it.

Caacupé translates that vernacular into a working typeface. It is a grotesque sans serif with low contrast, short ascenders and descenders, a generous x-height and a deliberately heavy color, built for headlines and short text at large sizes. Its terminals carry a subtle hint of the brush, a quiet trace of the painted signs it descends from, rather than a literal imitation. Details observed on the street, from the prevalence of uppercase to the hand-drawn flourishes of local sign painters, informed its decisions as the design moved from paper sketches to digital form. The result is a face made to speak loudly and clearly: direct, dense, and full of presence.

Language sits at the heart of the project. The neighborhood is home to a large Paraguayan community, and Guaraní is a first or second language for many residents. Caacupé was drawn with that reality in mind, giving particular attention to the letters that recur most often in Guaraní such as “y” and “v”, and to the marks the language needs, so that Guaraní text reads as naturally as Spanish. The typeface also includes broad Latin coverage, spanning the full Spanish set, extended Latin, currency symbols, fractions, mathematical signs and ligatures.

Caacupé is currently available in a Bold weight. Released under the SIL Open Font License, it aims to give a formal, open and freely available voice to a vernacular that rarely finds its way into type, and to stand as a small counterexample to the habit of designing for people whose context we have never looked at closely.

To contribute, see github.com/googlefonts/caacupe.

— Magdalena Alonso Rebollo, on Google Fonts

Coming to the App Store

Typecask has no deep links yet. Open the app and search for “Caacupe One”.

License

This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.
This license is copied below, and is also available with a FAQ at:
https://openfontlicense.org

-----------------------------------------------------------
SIL OPEN FONT LICENSE Version 1.1 - 26 February 2007
-----------------------------------------------------------

PREAMBLE
The goals of the Open Font License (OFL) are to stimulate worldwide
development of collaborative font projects, to support the font creation
efforts of academic and linguistic communities, and to provide a free and
open framework in which fonts may be shared and improved in partnership
with others.

The OFL allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and
redistributed freely as long as they are not sold by themselves. The
fonts, including any derivative works, can be bundled, embedded,
redistributed and/or sold with any software provided that any reserved
names are not used by derivative works. The fonts and derivatives,
however, cannot be released under any other type of license. The
requirement for fonts to remain under this license does not apply
to any document created using the fonts or their derivatives.

DEFINITIONS
"Font Software" refers to the set of files released by the Copyright
Holder(s) under this license and clearly marked as such. This may
include source files, build scripts and documentation.

"Reserved Font Name" refers to any names specified as such after the
copyright statement(s).

"Original Version" refers to the collection of Font Software components as
distributed by the Copyright Holder(s).

"Modified Version" refers to any derivative made by adding to, deleting,
or substituting -- in part or in whole -- any of the components of the
Original Version, by changing formats or by porting the Font Software to a
new environment.

"Author" refers to any designer, engineer, programmer, technical
writer or other person who contributed to the Font Software.

PERMISSION & CONDITIONS
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of the Font Software, to use, study, copy, merge, embed, modify,
redistribute, and sell modified and unmodified copies of the Font
Software, subject to the following conditions:

1) Neither the Font Software nor any of its individual components,
in Original or Modified Versions, may be sold by itself.

2) Original or Modified Versions of the Font Software may be bundled,
redistributed and/or sold with any software, provided that each copy
contains the above copyright notice and this license. These can be
included either as stand-alone text files, human-readable headers or
in the appropriate machine-readable metadata fields within text or
binary files as long as those fields can be easily viewed by the user.

3) No Modified Version of the Font Software may use the Reserved Font
Name(s) unless explicit written permission is granted by the corresponding
Copyright Holder. This restriction only applies to the primary font name as
presented to the users.

4) The name(s) of the Copyright Holder(s) or the Author(s) of the Font
Software shall not be used to promote, endorse or advertise any
Modified Version, except to acknowledge the contribution(s) of the
Copyright Holder(s) and the Author(s) or with their explicit written
permission.

5) The Font Software, modified or unmodified, in part or in whole,
must be distributed entirely under this license, and must not be
distributed under any other license. The requirement for fonts to
remain under this license does not apply to any document created
using the Font Software.

TERMINATION
This license becomes null and void if any of the above conditions are
not met.

DISCLAIMER
THE FONT SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT
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INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL
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Caacupe One

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