Urbana Typeface in use

La Silueta (an important publishing house in Bogotá) purchased a license of Urbana last March for the running text of a series of books on colombian photography: FotoTK. I have to say that the familiy behaves better than I expected in running text, even if this is not the primary use it was designed for. See it for yourselves, click on the image to enlarge. Urbana is available for purchase at Myfonts.com.

The history behind Urbana

Today, five out of the six versions of the family have been finished. However, when I first came up with the idea of drawing a new typeface that could be both economic and eye-catching (back on May, 2006) I couldn't imagine that something like Urbana could have any real possibilities in the market. But she did. The first sketches were just a play with the concept of round-curve and cut-curve and my ingenuity was evident.

One of the first sketches revealed that the typeface had a very high contrast right where the strokes changed their direction. When I saw this, knew that this had to be redone. And I started to think seriously in a type system, too.

After many, many revisions and countless hours in the computer, I can say that despite the fact that there's still a lot of work to be done, my first font files of this typeface are ready to use. My suggestion is this: you can use Urbana bold and black with its italics to compose headlines and captions. Urbana regular italic is still not finished, but it will soon be and running text will look like never before and you'll be able to save huge amounts of space, too. Urbana is available for purchase at Myfonts.com.

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Featured face: Urbana

Urbana is a contemporary sans-serif typeface inspired in the traditional lettering seen in one of the most popular, massive transportation means available in Bogotá (Colombia): “busetas” (small city buses). A mixture of influences reminiscent of modernism, hand lettering, cluttered spaces and improvisation are the source of its characteristic forms. Urbana was designed to save space and catch the reader’s attention. It is recommended for typesetting headlines, short paragraphs and any texts where the economy of space may be an issue. Urbana is one of the 25 favorite typefaces of 2007, according to the magazine Typographica.org.