Brick’s foundations lie in the signage of three prominent pubs in London’s East End, The Jolly Butchers (Brick Lane–now closed), The Royal Oak (Columbia Road), and The Prince Albert (Acton Street). Referencing their Art Deco traits, with a trace of Art Nouveau heritage, Brick is my re-interpretation and continuation of the vernaculars elegant gestures, brought into the 21st century. I first discovered the vernacular of Brick Lane street during one of my visits to London, in 2015, while studying Typeface Design in Reading. It wasn’t until several years later that the collective forms and development of the design began to materialise. Brick was initially released in 2019, in three weights, and was further extended in 2020 becoming a five weights (ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium & Black) type family, across two optical sizes (Text & Display) and it is available to license exclusively through <a href='https://www.colophon-foundry.org/typefaces/brick/' rel='noreferrer' target='_blank' className='linkInText'>Colophon Foundry</a>, in both Standard (‘STD’) and Professional (‘PRO’) versions. The latter encapsulates the prominent Truman brewery’s unique personality through an exhaustive series of OpenType features and stylistic alternates available within the PRO variant. If you want to know more about Brick's development, don't miss <a href='https://medium.com/@Colophon/brick-a-new-font-brewing-e2a982e39c8f' rel='noreferrer' target='_blank' className='linkInText'>the article</a> I wrote with Colophon, where you can learn a lot more about the project.

Brick

Thesaurus is a super type-family (16 styles) with one foot in the past & one foot in the present which was inspired by the typographic history of the city of Geneva. Thesaurus is based on the types that Robert Estienne brought from Paris to Geneva, which were later used by his son Henri II Estienne for printing the famous book "Thesaurus Græcæ Linguæ" in 1572. These metal types served, in some way, as a bridge between France and Switzerland, between Catholicism and Protestantism, and now, through Thesaurus, between past and present. Thesaurus had a <a href='https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/thesaurus' rel='noreferrer' target='_blank' className='linkInText'>first release</a> in January 2017 and was further extended in 2018 adding the <a href='https://www.typotheque.com/blog/new_thesaurus_display_italic' rel='noreferrer' target='_blank' className='linkInText'>Display Italic styles</a>, making Thesaurus sharper and even more dignified. These new styles were developed taking into consideration the feedback I've got from Thesaurus's first users. The creation of the Display Italic styles requested me to rethink many of the original terminations and remove optical compensations designed to enhance small sizes. Thesaurus has received the Gold award (first prize) at the European Design Awards 2018 and the Gold Award & Best Project of Category at the LAD - Latin American Design Awards 2019. Furthermore, it was one of the 4 projects awarded with the Mention of Excellence at the 8th Latin-American type-design biennial by Tipos Latinos (TL8) – out of 444 projects submitted this year. It was selected in the Superfamily category. It has also been awarded with Gold in the Graphis Type 4: Typeface Design Competition.

Thesaurus

Exentra is the project I developed during the MATD (Masters in Typeface Design) course 2014–15 at the University of Reading. My intention was to design an innovative and unique typeface that would appeal to designers doing forward-looking designs. Therefore, this typeface family was conceived for publications promoting forward-thinking through a contemporary and experimental vision of modern culture and trends. Its style combines the elegance and warmth of calligraphy with the precision and digital sharpness of the computer process that give it a contemporary look. Unconventional letter shapes, and the playful and dynamic design reinforce the idiosyncrasy of the typeface.

Exentra

Genève is a type family inspired by the rich typographic history of Geneva and was conceived as part of my Bachelor thesis at HEAD University, Geneva. In developing Genève I was inspired by the typeface used by French printer/editor/publisher Henri II Estienne in his famous book Thesaurus Linguæ Græcæ, published in Geneva in 1572. This typeface was brought to Geneva by Henri’s father, Robert Estienne, who, before settling in Geneva and working as Calvin’s printer, was the printer of France’s King, François I. This typeface highly influenced the typographers and printers in Geneva at that time. Henri and Robert Estienne’s work in Geneva helped it to become one of the most important cities in Europe for print and typography in the sixteenth century. Designed to be used on any type of printed support, Genève is a typography with personality and flexibility, which allows designers to express their ideas in different ways without losing coherence. Genève consists of four styles: Classique (Humanist serif), Austère (Geometric serif), Spontanée (Humanist sans-serif) and Alternative (Stencil, display version). These styles correspond to the different profiles of the city, reflecting its multiculturalism and diversity. I received the BEA Fondation Award for Young Artists for my work on the Genève Typeface. Some years later Genève typeface was further developed and became <a href='https://ferminguerrero.com/projects/thesaurus/' target='_blank' className='linkInText'>Thesaurus</a>.

Genève Typeface

For a school project we were asked to make typographic stamps in order to create an alphabet and then design posters with them. The challenge I set myself was to create a stamp that would stand out for its versatility and simplicity. I decided to use rope as the stamp material. For this, I designed a matrix which would work both as a support for the rope as well as a grid for the typeface. My matrix allows for the composition of all the glyphs of the alphabet and 4 different weights (light, regular, medium and bold).

Letter Stamps Design

Title or short-text font, influenced both by the geometry-favoring artistic movements of the beginning of the 20th Century and the work of Dutch designer Max Kisman. This typeface aims to explore the relationship between the different parts of the letterforms as well as their hierarchy, while teasing with the limits of legibility. Manifesta family is formed by four different weights (light, regular, medium, bold), each one with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation marks and diacritic characters.

Manifesta

Circ is a modular display font, based on geometric forms deriving from the circle.

Circ

Viga is an experimental capitals-only display font influenced by constructivism, with a high level of abstraction. The grid I created for developing Viga was inspired by truss beams used in architecture.