Guanabara is the third release of Plau Type Foundry. The family started from the need of a wayfinding typeface that had personality enough to be the brand typeface for a city.

The city of Rio de Janeiro, with its never-ending curves and all year long summer weather provided the constraints and requirements of this typeface.

We developed that idea into a versatile sans-serif family, with 8 weights from Thin to Black and true italics. We also wanted to give Guanabara a dual personality – modern and retro. For that, we included alternate forms for the letters a, g and r for the romans. For complex text settings, it features figures for tables and proportional and in lining and oldstyle set-ups as well as small caps, fractions and all that jazz (we mean, samba).

And it needed to be recognizable and distinct. For that, design features like tapered R legs, capitals with classic proportions and calligraphic finishes on the terminals proved crucial.

And last, but not least, like Rio, it had to welcome many cultures (so it works with virtually all latin languages).

We came to think of it as the "Typeface from Ipanema", with a classic, timeless look, swinging elegance and joyful attitude.