As a type designer from Latin America — a place where type is currently booming with talent, creativity, drive, and a growing community — I wanted to curate a collection of typefaces that illustrates the wide range of voices, complex history, and many cultures that help shape our visual landscape and our Latin American identity.

Inspired by Vocal Type’s ethos, “Diversifying Design. Preserving culture. Crafting Typefaces.”, I went looking for the Latin American designers who are taking a piece of their culture or an event of cultural significance, and telling that story through the form of a typeface.

Latin America itself is a group of countries that contains a great diversity of languages, cultures, experiences, perspectives, and histories that coexist and are in constant movement throughout the American continent and around the world. Being in constant conversation with each other helps us reflect on the present and envision a better, more collaborative future.

Each of these typefaces is a cultural artifact that honors, preserves, restores, revives, translates, adapts, interprets, or reimagines the memories and graphic language of a particular time and place. By containing memories of our struggles and achievements, they are also here to remind us of where we come from and where we might be heading.

These typefaces contain multiple histories and narratives, which I hope will catalyze future conversations about the intersection of type and culture.

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*This evolving list is curated and maintained by Juan Villanueva, a type designer and educator from Peru working at Monotype and based in Brooklyn, NY.

✏️. If you would like to add a project to the list, please fill out this form.

Thanks to: Gabriel Pulpo, Cristóbal Henestroza, Aline Kaori, Diego Sanz Salas, Javier Viramontes, and B. Benedicto for your contributions. And special thanks to Tanvi Sharma for asking me about this topic and giving me the push I needed to compile this list.*