Industry: Design

Typography for Catalpa Font Family

No middle ground: a display family built exclusively at the extremes

Catalpa is a display type family by TypeTogether designers José Scaglione and Veronika Burian, conceived entirely around headline use and inspired by historical wood type. The family deliberately skips mid-range weights, offering only four light styles (Hairline through Light) and four heavy styles (Extrabold through Extrablack), plus two variable font files—one for each weight extreme. It is the first of a planned trilogy intended to cover the full range of editorial typographic needs.

Set in Catalpa

Insights

The eight styles are split into two discrete clusters with no intermediate weights, a deliberate structural choice reflecting the family's display-only purpose.
Geometric influence reads more clearly in the light weights, while the heavy weights expand primarily in width and mass rather than following classical stroke modulation.
Distinctive characters include a reversed-contrast S/s and angular constructions on Q, M, W, w, a, f, 2, and 3—features tied explicitly to wood type quirkiness.
Each weight extreme ships as its own single-axis variable font, allowing fine-grained weight tuning within the light or bold range independently.