Neopol enters Tipos Latinos Biennial 10th Edition

Tipos Latinos is the largest Latin American exhibition dedicated to typography. For its 10th edition, Neopol is one of 75 works selected from 768 entries, and is now part of the exhibition across its venues in the region. Neopol was selected in the Superfamily category.

Historically, the Tipos Latinos Biennial has been heavily dominated by its 12 founding member nations. Neopol marks a major milestone for Puerto Rican typography, as it is the first Puerto Rican entry in the biennial’s history. This achievement highlights the growing visibility of Puerto Rican type design on the broader Latin American stage, standing alongside established design powerhouses like Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.

Neopol started as a small project where I was playing with the idea of a sans serif typeface that merged brush influences into its strokes. While it started as a retro display face, it soon became a full-blown superfamily as I continued to add more stylistic sets, which I eventually split into their own subfamilies. It began with the main style, Print, where the brush influence was mainly focused on its capital letters’ entry points, like in B, D, M and N, and the arched legs in A, V and W. Then came the Stencil style, as I was looking to make the font look more industrial while keeping the flair of its main style. I could have stopped there, of course, but I wanted to push myself even further, and instead of making an italic version, which would have been the natural course of action, I decided to go full Script.

By the time I started Neopol, I was already familiar with Cyrillic. I had done it many times before in Sato, Datura, Senteia, Ozelot, Zorzal and others. However, this would be the first time trying the cursive forms of the Cyrillic alphabet, which, mind you, are an entirely different set of letterforms. To make matters even more complicated, finding good Cyrillic cursive fonts as references is a challenge on its own. I did what I could with the knowledge I had available, but I reached a point where I knew I needed help from an expert. And that’s where Tural Alisoy from TAFT Foundry (Azerbaijan) came into the project.

I met Tural on Instagram, and we exchanged messages occasionally. Mostly me asking him how to properly design the letter schwa, or him asking me to improve the manat symbol in some of my fonts. Naturally, I thought of him and asked him if he would like to be part of this project. Enthusiastically, he said yes, and I hired him to help me refine the drawings of the Cyrillic. To my surprise, the Print and Stencil versions were pretty good. Just a few adjustments here and there. The cursive version? Oh boy. There was plenty of work to do. He corrected almost every drawing I had done. He brought great references and pushed the font’s drawings to a whole new level. I learned a lot from the process, and thanks to this experience I feel more confident taking on cursive on my own.

We collaborated mainly via email, since there was a language barrier between us. But that didn’t stop us from working together. After a month or so, Neopol had grown into three distinct styles that converge harmoniously on the page. It gives megacity vibes: some parts urban, some parts industrial and some parts neighborhood. The brush influence was now expressed across the styles. In the end, I added one final subfamily, which I decided to call Sans: a somewhat more somber version of the main Print style that serves as a support subfamily for the others.

This project taught me that worldwide collaborations are possible, even for personal projects like my font making venture. Being recognized and entering Tipos Latinos was just a side effect of this amazing collaboration.