Girassol Font

About Girassol

Girassol is a display typeface inspired by the hand-painted street signs in and around Carcavelos, Portugal. It attempts to collect, synthesize, and lovingly evoke the identity and spirit of the region in which the original forms were encountered, while acknowledging my own relationship to and presence in the place and the design.

The primary characteristics that define Girassol include its condensed proportions, moderate contrast following the expansion model, a thorny, decorative serif construction that pierces the baseline and cap height, and playful flourishes that mimic the decoration possible in hand-painted signage.

Numerous discretionary ligatures play on the typeface's angular and thorny construction to evoke a sense of improvisation in the signs on which the forms are based.

The smallcaps are the result of my effort to capture the secondary style found in the Carcavelos signs. My approach to the smallcaps lead to a set of letters that perfectly complements the main caps but which simultaneously becomes softer and more gentle because of its more square proportion.

Girassol feels at home set in large, striking titles and smaller graphical vignettes.