Rodrigo Araya Salas is a graphic designer, illustrator, and typographer based in Santiago, Chile. Passionate about illustration and art since his youth, Rodrigo naturally gravitated toward his chosen field as he grew older, eventually establishing RodrigoTypo, his own independent type foundry.
His work is always fresh and fun with an emphasis on youthful exuberance and the Cyrillic alphabet. With more than 100 type designs available on YouWorkForThem, his work has made it into our Typography For Children collection – more than once. Rodrigo’s innovative type designs have earned several awards over the years and he’s participated in international typography conferences and lectures on typography.
One of his most recent releases through YouWorkForThem is Alquitran, a contemporary blackletter type design that was inspired by pichação, a distinctive style of graffiti found in the major metropolises of Brazil. From the Portuguese word, pichar (tar), pichação translates to writing in pitch or tar. The style of graffiti is reminiscent of 80s metal band album covers, featuring letterforms that are often nearly indecipherable except to those who placed the lettering. They tend to be cryptic with a structure heavily influenced by Viking runes and gothic lettering, featuring rough angular strokes written with fury.
While pichação is both a youthful assertion and a social protest, the battle between whether it is art or “visual pollution,” as some call it, is a war that has been waging since the 1980s. Alquitran, on the other hand, is pure typographical art, a type design that captures the essence of Brazilian graffiti in digital form. Designed with Francisco Páez, Alquitran explores runic lines yet remains legible, enabling designers to add a touch of the São Paulo streets to any graphic design.
Alquitran is available in Thin, Light, Regular, Bold, and Black. For greater design versatility, it also offers Black Line and Black Shadow for crafting a more three-dimensional effect. Alquitran comes equipped with three extra sets of Dingbats offering symbols, arrows, icons, shapes, banners, and lines.
While Alquitran can be used for very short blocks of text, it is best used in design projects that need a strong, urban type design as the focal point, including product packaging, logos, advertising, merchandise, apparel, signage, displays, identity, and branding projects.
Alquitran offers additional OpenType features that include fractions, ordinals, and stylistic alternates. It extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Dutch, and Afrikaans for graphic designs aimed at a global audience.
RodrigoTypo currently offers 110 products through YouWorkForThem, a massive collection of unique, handcrafted display fonts for graphic design projects of all kinds. Particularly if you work on design projects for child-centric companies and/or publishing, his portfolio is one you’re going to want to check out and bookmark for your upcoming projects!
