Originally established as Without Foundry in 2012, W Type Foundry is run by Diego Aravena, Patricio Truenos, and Bana Arasanz, three type designers with a wealth of field knowledge under their collective belts.
The University of Chile’s Lettering and Typography degree program is where it all began; Diego Aravena and Felipe Sanzana met during their attendance and established Without Foundry together. The studio’s evolution would see it later become W Type Foundry, witnessing the 2016 addition of both Bana Arasanz and Patricio Truenos, two more skilled typographers in their own right.
Today, W Type Foundry is run by Diego, Patricio, and Bana. Diego still teaches at the Lettering and Typography Degree program, while Patricio educates students in graphic design and calligraphy. Bana, a lover of all things pop culture, works in art direction. All three bring a finely tuned skill set to the studio, a place dedicated to providing graphic designers with typography that is expertly crafted from an architectural standpoint, while also offering a vast range of OpenType features and extensive multilingual support. Their designs are so impressive, they’ve had work selected for both the 2014 and 2016 editions of the Latin American Typography Biennale.
One of their more recent releases on YouWorkForThem is Fuse, aptly named for its dual inspiration of geometric and humanist design elements. Designed by Salvador Rodriguez and Diego Aravena, Fuse offers an architecture that follows the traditions of both of its influences, with a fresh clarity that meets contemporary design aesthetics. High legibility is a hallmark of this font, even in small point, making it a solid choice for design projects that involve tiny type like business cards, fine print, labels, and product ingredient lists.
Fuse is available in nine weights that include Thin, UltraLight, Light, Book, Regular, Bold, Extra Bold, Black and UltraBlack, with corresponding italics for each. This varied range makes Fuse well suited to a wide variety of design projects, working beautifully in everything from headlines and editorials to signage, displays, advertising, publishing, corporate communications, letterhead, logos, product packaging, infographics, motion graphics, presentations, body copy, website design, and mobile applications. If a project requires design cohesion across a diverse range of media types, as in the case of branding or identity projects, Fuse is a fantastic choice with 18 fonts to work with.
One of the things that W Type Foundry strives to achieve with every release is making sure that designers have the most adaptable, flexible fonts to work with. OpenType features are a big deal and Fuse offers a ton of them, including capitals to small caps, case sensitive forms, numerators, denominators, fractions, ordinals, standard ligatures, discretionary ligatures, slashed zero, tabular figures, oldstyle figures, subscript, superscript, small caps, and stylistic alternates.
Fuse extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, and Dutch for global accessibility.
W Type Foundry currently offers 15 products through YouWorkForThem and given their body of work so far, we’re really excited to see what they release next. Visit their portfolio to view the rest of their work and keep an eye on it so you don’t miss any of their upcoming additions!
