Typeface Design for Sonora
A 1972 experimental alphabet finally gets its authorised digital release
Sonora is a typeface designed by Rosmarie Tissi, based on her experimental alphabet drawings from 1972 and digitised in 2024 in collaboration with type designer Céline Odermatt. The letterforms use parallel lines in place of closed counters, producing a stencil-like shimmer, and were conceived as a deliberate departure from Swiss Style conventions dominant at the time. Odermatt expanded the original ~50-character alphabet to over 200 characters, and she and Tissi remodelled diacritics and punctuation originally produced by Letraset, applying subtle optical adjustments to the stripes. Released by Lineto with font engineering by Alphabet, Berlin, the typeface is also available as a limited-edition dry-transfer lettering sheet paired with a digital download code.
Set in Sonora
Insights
- Tissi named both alphabets after Mexican states visited on her travels, with no intended cultural reference—geography served as label, not inspiration.
- The absence of closed counters, replaced by parallel stripes, is the structural logic unifying every letterform in the system.
- Tissi reclaimed rights to the companion typeface Sinaloa from Monotype in 2020, terminating unauthorised digital versions before initiating the Lineto collaboration in 2023.
- Odermatt and Tissi remodelled diacritics and punctuation that had originally been produced by Letraset, rather than by Tissi herself in 1972.
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