Acarau Display Font Family

Acarau is a 6 fonts display typeface with high reverse contrast—since from Roman capitals and calligraphy, usually Latin alphabet letters have thiner horizontal steams and thicker verticals, these features being optical or visual—quite adequate for logos, headlines and posters.

Moreover, the style of the typeface is inspired by Italics form factor: lowercase letters having less strokes to make their shapes; A has one story; E has one stroke shape, such as K, G, Y and Z; F has a descent.

To give it more calligraphic feeling, there is contrast for uppercases as well, this is very perceived by the diagonal letters like A, K, M, N, V, W, X, Y and Z. J also has a descent. Q and R have natural swashes, but they have alternates in case the costumer want to go for more usual forms—including accent marked letters.

Acarau is a 12 months project, the contrast for uppercases were increasing as the process was made. In the middle it is found suitable blend the letter shapes with the history of Brazilian music from the 70’s and 80’s, since the font has a tropical, warm, spicy and nostalgic feeling. Songs from bands and singers that emerged on Rio de Janeiro like Paralamas do Sucesso, Cazuza, Lulu Santos and Kid Abelha bring the beach accent and rhythm that this font has.

OpenType features complement the set, which has Multi-Lingual support for a comprehensive Latin set, including Vietnamese—meaning more than 640 glyphs:

Case-Sensitive forms, so symbols can properly align to uppercase letters;
Ligatures, to better reading for z_y and L_I, and style for s_s, w_w_w; also for ease arrows and punctuation typing;
Stylistic Set 1: two story a—including accent marked letters;
Stylistic Set 2: two story g—including accent marked letters;
Stylistic Set 3: diagonal (usual) z—including accent marked letters;
Stylistic Set 4: flower i and j dots;
Contextual alternates;
Terminal forms, for R and Q;
Ordinals.