Yesterday afternoon, we sat down to write our weekly Type Tuesday post, about Buenos Aires type collective Sudtipos’ Confitería—and as we were doing it, they released their Dilemma typeface.
Trying to figure out which to feature was a good dilemma to have. Ultimately, we decided to run with both.
First up: Confitería, designed by Julieta Ulanovsky, in collaboration with Sol Matas.
As Ulanovsky says, “Confitería is the Spanish word for a shop where sweets and chocolates are made and sold, which sometimes has a tea room. … There is one iconic confitería in Buenos Aires that I love more than the rest because, some 60 years ago, it put up its marvelous sign and never took it down. It’s big. Very big. And the lettering in its name is written in a timelessly beautiful vertical script—the most attractive I have ever seen.”
The 18 styles of Confitería pay tribute to that sign with a retro aesthetic and smooth strokes that would indeed find a fitting home in a restaurant or sweet shop.
Alejandro Paul’s Dilemma, meanwhile, draws inspiration from Peignot Fonderie’s Polyphème, Cyclopéen and Extra Condensé designs from the dawn of the 20th century.
“From these initial points of reference, Sudtipos went further and reimagined these projects for an actual use by blending them into a unique and complex type system. Dilemma is defined as ‘a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives’ … and that is exactly how we designed this font. We created a workhorse system where each style functioned well alone but would be more powerful when working as a team, pairing the sans styles with the serifs.”
The resulting typeface comes in 42 styles, with three widths and seven weights in both sans and serif. Check it out in action below.
