Alexandra Thornber

Arzachel is a humanistic sanserif with a big x-height and a specific organic look. Its design is scientifically sharp and efficient in small type sizes as well as rugged and dramatic in headlines.
Arzachel’s essential feeling comes from several features: all the letters are slightly sloped, stem terminations are flared at the top, and the terminals in letters a, c, e, f… are widening with the inside parts completely flat. The stroke contrast is low in the regular weight while it increases in the black; finally the capitals have an inscriptional flavor. Despite being a sanserif (thus a product of recent typography) Arzachel’s roots stretch back to the Renaissance tradition: Olocco took inspiration from some of the early and rather weird types cut in Venice in the 15th century.
Arzachel was conceived during Olocco’s MA in Reading to provide a companion for his Zenon for use in small type sizes. But instead of expanding the Zenon family with optical sizes, the designer decided on a sans with its own personality rather than a sanserif version of Zenon with chopped-off serifs.

Sole Sans, companion to Sole Serif, is a newspaper sanserif available in a wide range of weights and styles. It’s a workhorse, suitable for headlines, diagrams, graphics and tabular work. Contrast at the junctions between arches and stems is a feature of early 19th-century sanserifs which inspired Sole Sans. It was originally designed for the leading Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 ore.

Sempione Grotesk is a sans of ‘Swiss’ inspiration with a big x-height. It works well at all sizes, from small to large, and is suitable for both publishing and advertising. Starting from the study of Forma typeface, this font picks up some very different typographic tradition and ideas. These include ligatures and ornaments etc., usually associated with seriffed typefaces, and features typical of the Swiss school of sans serifs such as horizontal terminations and letters that tend to be of equal width.

Poly is serif typeface, inspired by vintage travel guides, it comes in 5
weights and 2 styles, a total of 10 weights. Each weights comes with around
500 glyphs and opentype features. Poly is best used for editorial publications.

Tejuela (Spanish for “Wood Shingle”) is a neoclassical type inspired by the wooden architecture of the ancient churches of Chiloé, an archipelago in southern Chile; which are World Heritage Sites. This typeface has rough and broken forms but with soft strokes.
The neoclassical characteristic of Tejuela is due to the architecture of these temples, which belong to this style but adapted to wood with excellent quality and ingenuity by Chilote builders using a material available in the area. Therefore, this typeface reflects the tradition of the fonts of that period, but adapted to the coarseness and warmth of the southern wood of the new world.

Tejuela is useful for extensive texts in literature, history, art and heritage; as also for short and large phrases in headlines according to the occasion.

Tejuela has eight variants in Roman a Italic versions, with small caps, Old Style and Lining numbers, ligatures, alternative glyphs, among other OpenType features; special mention to the capital letters Swash of the italic versions, which serve to generate delicate compositions. In addition, it has two stylistic sets to compose border ornaments inspired by the Chilote Architecture: colonnades and corners, only using the numbers on the keyboard; it is important that the line spacing has the same value as the font.
Its 800 to 940 glyphs are suitable for writing 219 different languages.

I appreciate the great help of Franco Jonas, Alexis Navarro, Marcela Aguilera, Pedro González & Diego Aravena in this process, among many people of the craft that they supported selflessly.