Industry: Design

Typeface Design for the Chaco Font Family

From Argentine road signs to a full editorial system

Chaco is a sans-serif family by Rubén Fontana that originated as a research project addressing roadway signage legibility problems in Argentina, later expanding into a signage system benchmarked against international standards from eight countries. Its design solves for long-distance and small-size legibility without resorting to artificial condensation, while remaining equally suited to identity, branding, and editorial text. Seven weights with matching italics, variable axes, and a broad Latin character set covering over 150 languages and Vietnamese give it wide typographic range.

Set in Chaco

Insights

The design maintains internal word spacing to avoid illegible abbreviations on signs, without faux condensation.
Inktraps serve both functional and aesthetic roles, and numeral proportions are specifically differentiated from small caps and capitals to make alphanumeric strings unambiguous.
A custom 'ch' digraph was added to reflect a prominent phoneme in native South American languages.
Some vertical strokes have their weight reversed as a deliberate distinctiveness device, and all arrows, symbols, and geometric shapes are drawn to match each typographic weight.