With well over a decade serving the graphic design community, what began as Chile’s first digital type foundry is now an unstoppable force to be reckoned with. LatinoType was established by Miguel Hernández, who was later joined by Luciano Vergara and Daniel Hernández. These days, the trio can still be found hard at work, crafting type designs with their signature South American flair.
High functionality, versatility, and contemporary design aesthetics are hallmarks of the LatinoType foundry. Being graphic designers themselves, the men behind the business have an innate understanding of exactly what other graphic designers are seeking when it comes to their own design projects. They try to hit every mark with each release and they’re clearly doing something right because their work can be found in designs all over the world.
In addition to leading workshops on type design, LatinoType spends a lot of time collaborating with other typographers and graphic designers. They have built a truly supportive atmosphere for upcoming and would-be type designers, and they’re all about sharing their knowledge with anyone who takes an interest in the field. They work with typographers all the time, type designers that include Jorge Cisterna and Bruno Jara.
Jorge is a graphic designer from southern Chile. While he worked as an art director in the advertising sector for a number of years, an interest in type design eventually emerged and it’s a career he’s pursued for ten solid years. He’s been contributing to LatinoType’s font library since 2008 and his work shows a clear preference for that rich Latin American flavor the foundry is known for.
Bruno graduated from Santiago University in Chile and joined the LatinoType foundry after working at Museo de Arte Contemporaneo and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. So far, he’s worked on three type designs, including one of LatinoType’s more recent releases, Lumiere.
Designed in partnership between Jorge and Bruno, Lumiere is “a fourteen layer delight” that found its inspiration in Herb Lubalin’s Serif Gothic. The goal with Lumiere was to design a unique display typeface that offered a strong personality while also remaining neutral enough to work in a wide variety of design applications. They managed to ace this because with so many options on hand, there’s nothing you can’t do with Lumiere.
Bruno and Jorge wanted to make Lumiere as versatile as possible, so they crafted a number of layered fonts in addition to its core styles. This font family offers a strong, wide architecture with all-caps letterforms that make an impact wherever they are applied. With all of the layering options available, the design possibilities are truly endless. Lumiere is beautifully suited to everything from displays and signage, to advertising, posters, book covers, album art, product packaging, apparel, merchandise, logos, branding, and identity projects.
Lumiere One provides the basic solid letterforms, while Two, Three, and Four offer layer options for shadowing. With Lumiere Five, you’ll find crisply-drawn outlined letterforms. Six features a solid inline, while Seven features a dotted inline option for layering. Lumiere Eight offers the basic letterforms comprised of a series of tightly-drawn, diagonal lines. Lumiere Nine, Ten, and Eleven provide outlined letterforms with three-dimensional shadows. Lumiere Twelve offers the basic letterforms with an inline design already drawn in, while Thirteen offers a dotted inline design. To round out the family, Lumiere Fourteen offers outlined letterforms with a diagonal line fill.
The Lumiere family offers a number of additional features that include case sensitive forms, fractions, standard ligatures, ordinals, and stylistic alternates for even greater versatility. Its multilingual support is extensive, covering Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Dutch, and Afrikaans for exceptionally far-reaching global accessibility.
LatinoType currently offers more than 150 products through YouWorkForThem, providing a varied range of type designs to suit projects of all kinds. Visit their portfolio to view the rest of their work and bookmark it so you won’t miss out on any of their future releases!
