Feijoa

It’s been fascinating to witness the blooming of Latin type designers these past few years. There is some amazing stuff happening in Spain, Portugal and their once colonies across the Atlantic, as if a whole generation of type designers has come of age during the last decade. One thing their serif and script designs share is a pronounced sensuality.

So it was quite surprising to discover Feijoa, a new text face hailing from the other side of the world that displayed that same trait in its forms. Its most distinctive feature is the almost complete absence of straight lines, which makes for a warm and sensuous design. Those gently curved straights and rounded corners lend the design a beautiful organic, almost calligraphic quality. Yet there is nothing frivolous to the typeface, it all is functional and looks very self-assured.

Feijoa is an accomplished design in three text weights and a display version: a lean, efficient type family with no fat on the meat. The typeface comes packed to the rafters with typographic goodies like numerous figure sets, arrows and dingbats, and an extended set of Licko-style ligatures, only better. It is indeed hard to believe that Feijoa was Kris Sowersby’s first venture into serious book face territory. I would be tempted to say this looks promising for the future, but frankly that would be patronizing, even insulting towards a designer as talented as Sowersby.

Yves Peters is a graphic designer / rock drummer / father of three who tries to be critical about typography without coming across as a snob. Previously a columnist for Typographer.org and editor-in-chief of The FontFeed, he currently divides his time between teaching at the Communication, Media and Design department of Artevelde University of Applied Sciences, and publishing at Adobe Create and writing for a variety of type foundries, weaving pop culture and design trends into foundational typographic stories. His ability to identify most typefaces on sight is utterly useless in daily life.