Montserrat

Montserrat is a neighborhood in Buenos Aires before it is a font. Its old posters and shop signs, lettering from the first half of the 20th century, are what Julieta Ulanovsky set out to save. Redevelopment keeps changing the neighborhood, and once those signs are gone they are gone for good, so her project drew them into a typeface that anyone could use.

The result is a wide, open sans, and it went onto Google Fonts in December 2011. There are 2 sister families. Montserrat Alternates swaps in many of the more particular letterforms from the street. Montserrat Subrayada, Spanish for underlined, preserves a local habit of drawing the underline into the letters themselves.

2017

The family got a second life that year. Jacques Le Bailly of Baron von Fonthausen redrew it over the summer and adjusted every weight, making the Regular lighter so it would work in longer text. Then in the fall Ulanovsky, Sol Matas and Juan Pablo del Peral led the Cyrillic, with advice from Carolina Giovagnoli, Maria Doreuli and Alexei Vanyashin.

What you get now is 18 styles, 9 weights from Thin to Black with italics, and a deep OpenType set: small caps, old style and tabular figures, fractions, a stylistic set. Vietnamese is covered as well.

We think it is at its best in headings, button labels and posters. The width that makes a title look open costs a lot of line length in a paragraph, and a page of it at 16 px reads stretched sideways.