Labrada

Labrada started with a practical problem: how to write down the language of the Qom, an Indigenous people of South America whose culture rests on oral tradition. Mercedes Jáuregui took that question into the Master of Typeface Design at the University of Buenos Aires, and what came out was the first typeface Jáuregui published.

The aim was double. The letters should carry something of the richness of spoken conversation and storytelling in those cultures, and at the same time talk with the classic book forms well enough to hold up in long, immersive reading. So it is a text serif first, with plenty of life in it.

Jáuregui is a graphic designer in Buenos Aires who has taught typography at the university since 2003 and mostly builds digital projects for NGOs. The family was finished with Omnibus-Type, a collective foundry in the same city: Eduardo Rodríguez Tunni and Oscar Guerrero did the font development, and Aldo De Losa, Pablo Cosgaya, Emma Marichal and Rosalie Wagner assisted on the design.

There are 18 styles, 9 weights from Thin at 100 to Black at 900, each with an italic. The italic is a lot narrower than the roman, about 11% across a line, which makes it pull away clearly when used for emphasis. Old style and lining figures, a slashed zero and fractions round it out. We would read a whole book in the Regular without complaint; the Thin and Black are better saved for covers and chapter titles.