by Beatriz Lozano
Ancho is a variable display
sans inspired by Mexican
cuisine and the architecture of Teotihuacán. It is my first
completed typeface and was a
personal project that I took on to learn the type design process
and to honor my culture.
I believe Latinx and Mexican cultures deserve a design that
is not only beautiful but also
innovative, and that is what
I strived for when designing
Ancho.
This project originally started
as a poster series based on different dishes of Mexican cuisine, which evolved to
creating custom lettering for the most popular peppers we
use in our dishes. Eventually, I
honed in on the Ancho pepper, which translates to “wide,”
allowing for the exciting potential
to exaggerate the forms of
the letters.
After designing the heaviest version first, I experimented with designing a thin version that maintains the same skeleton of the characters. Having both extremes allowed me to turn Ancho into a variable font ranging from thin to ultrabold.
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This project originally started
as a poster series based on different dishes of Mexican cuisine, which evolved to
creating custom lettering for the most popular peppers we
use in our dishes. Eventually, I
honed in on the Ancho pepper, which translates to “wide,”
allowing for the exciting potential
to exaggerate the forms of
the letters.
After designing the heaviest version first, I experimented with designing a thin version that maintains the same skeleton of the characters. Having both extremes allowed me to turn Ancho into a variable font ranging from thin to ultrabold.
After designing the heaviest version first, I experimented with designing a thin version that maintains the same skeleton of the characters. Having both extremes allowed me to turn Ancho into a variable font ranging from thin to ultrabold.
I love type design because the process is quite methodical, and I am fascinated with patterns and mathematical relationships between letterforms. In type design, all of the characters are composed of a set of core forms. H and O are the first two letters to be designed in most typefaces, and this was true in Ancho’s case. Having these two characters drawn allowed me to base all of the stems in the typeface off of the H and all of the curves off of the O.
However, it’s not as simple as copying and pasting forms; each character has to be adjusted optically. Going past the numerical restrictions and using my own artistic judgment is the aspect of type design that I often find most challenging. For example, round characters (CGJOQU) have to be designed with overshoots to compensate for the negative space around the forms. This means the forms extend above the cap height and below the baseline. Numerically the O is taller than rectangular characters like the H, but optically they appear balanced.
Paradoxically, the methodical expectations of the type design process make the act of breaking the design rules even more rewarding. In recent years, we have seen more and more experimental typefaces as a means of decolonizing type design and questioning the validity of the idealized eurocentric expectations of letterforms. The rules of type design allow us to design a set of characters that can function cohesively as a typeface. However, breaking these expectations allows us to infuse originality into our designs. In Ancho’s case, the letters that embody this idea are the Y, K, and R, which were heavily influenced by the forms of the Teotihuacan pyramids. Moreover, Ancho includes two alternates for the ‘Q’ that were both inspired by hand-painted lettering seen outside of shops in Mexico. In fact, Ancho was originally created to be used for designing exclusively in Spanish, but I went ahead and designed the full extended Latin alphabet so that it can be used in multiple languages.
ancho in use:
