Montserrat Alternates

Julieta Ulanovsky drew this family to rescue the painted posters and shop signs of Montserrat, a Buenos Aires neighborhood, as they looked in the first half of the 20th century. The district keeps being rebuilt, and each time a few more of those letters go for good, so she drew a type family from them before they could all vanish.

The family has 3 branches. Plain Montserrat; Subrayada, Spanish for underlined, which keeps a local habit of underlines joined into the letters; and the Alternates on this page, where many of the letters take special forms closer to the signs.

Most of the drawing you see now dates from 2017. Jacques Le Bailly, working at Baron von Fonthausen, went over the whole family that summer and took the Regular down a shade so longer passages would sit better. Cyrillic was added after that, a job Ulanovsky shared with Sol Matas and Juan Pablo del Peral while 3 consultants, Carolina Giovagnoli, Maria Doreuli and Alexei Vanyashin, looked over it. Vietnamese is in there too.

18 styles run from Thin to Black, each with an italic, and the italics come out almost exactly as wide as the romans, so a slanted word does not push the line any longer. Turn on the OpenType panel and there are true small caps, fractions, ordinals, and old style figures beside the tabular ones.

Even so we would keep it to short runs. It is a wide face to begin with, and the odd letters that make a logo or a café sign memorable start to catch the eye in a paragraph, where you want them not to.