Guadalupe

The GUADALUPE fonts were inspired by the unique architectural lettering at the famed Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Rustic and random, with unusual letterforms, GUADALUPE suggests the past and present, the handmade and the machine-made.

For my version, I redrew the letters and added missing characters. Then I carved and printed a linoleum cut; this added a hand-crafted texture including the stray "chatter" characteristic of the medium. And now there’s a cleaner companion font, minus the chatter, GUADALUPE DOS. Each font has two variants of each letter in the upper- and lowercase positions to create more of a handmade feel.

More about the basilica and the lettering: The current building was built in 1974-1976 and was designed by the architect Pedro Ramírez Vásquez. What especially appealed to me, of course, was the lettering inside and out. Reflective of the style of its time, the letters were very different from the usual metal letters seen on buildings. Some of the letters suggest early Christian texts and incorporates Greek forms: the phi-like Q, the chi-rho Rs, the cruciform Ts.

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special effect