Kickstarter

I am Julieta Ulanovsky. I live and work in a traditional neighborhood of Buenos Aires called Montserrat.

The old posters and signs in this place inspired me to design a typeface that rescues the beauty of urban typography from the first half of the twentieth century. The goal is to rescue what is in Montserrat and set it free, under a free, libre and open source license, the SIL Open Font License. 

As urban development changes this place, it will never return to its original form and loses forever the designs that are so special and unique. To draw the letters, I rely on examples of lettering in the urban space. Each selected example produces its own variants in length, width and height proportions, each adding to the Montserrat family. The old typographies and canopies are irretrievable when they are replaced. 

There are other revivals, but those do not stay close to the originals. The letters that inspired this project have work, dedication, care, color, contrast, light and life, day and night! These are the types that make the city look so beautiful.

At a formal level, I do not neglect aspects of type design that are functional and contemporary. Montserrat is a geometric style of type that has subtle optical adjustments. The result is a sans serif family with multiple versions and multiple possibilities, both in the editorial and corporate realm. 

With Kickstarter, you can participate in this project. I hope you enjoy the city as much as I do! Help me rescue these forms before there is no standing marquee left. 

The Montserrat family is envisioned with 9 type styles, eventually. You can catch a glimpse of these display styles in the video, but they are still very early in their development. 

To start the family, the most important styles are being created in this project - the Regular weight of the upright Roman style. I am making two fonts though, one with an alternative set of capitals letterforms to capture the variety and soul of Buenos Aires!

• Montserrat Regular
• Montserrat Regular Alternate Caps

Here is a preview of some of the Alternate Caps:

If this project is funded, it will be published in Google Web Fonts! The Montserrat Project has the full support of the Google Web Fonts team, who will review its technical details to ensure it works perfectly as a web font. The font will be hand-hinted by Google too.

This project will take around one month: the ‘Montserrat Regular’ and ‘Montserrat Regular Alternate Caps’ families will have all glyphs required by Google Web Fonts for Basic Latin. The Project Rewards will be sent out before Christmas. 

If this Kickstarter raises more than the target amount, I will expand the scope of the project to include more Extended Latin characters.

Please note that this project’s funds are paid to ‘TeX Users Group’ (office@tug.org), a US based 501(c)3 non-profit who are kindly running a ‘Libre Font Fund.' This enables me to receive the funds outside the USA.

Muchas gracias to Diego Levy for helping me to create the video for this project!