Paquito

Story

Paquito is a small family of serif fonts for use in display sizes. Its three weights have been quite whimsically drawn by type designer Juanjo Lopez. The letterforms are condensed in width, and they all look as if they had been hand-lettered with a fine-tipped pen. This creates a high degree of irregularity in the design. Many of Paquito’s uppercase letters are top-heavy; for example, the upper counter of the ‘R’ is much larger than its lower one. The numerals are neither lining figures nor oldstyle figures; instead, their tops fall somewhere between the x-height and cap-height, and they feature some descending elements, too. The fonts’ lowercase letters have a big x-height, and their ascenders only just peek above the tops of the fonts’ tall capitals. Paquito’s fonts include several useful OpenType features. First and foremost are all of the ligatures – 46 of them, to be exact. There are ligatures for both uppercase and lowercase letter pairs. The fonts also have case-sensitive punctuation, and localized diacritics for Polish (this feature substitutes true kreskas in place of acute accents). Paquito should be used in larger point sizes, where its details and intentional quirks will be visible. Another characteristic that makes Paquito good for headlines and display applications is the relative narrowness with which it has been drawn; at sizes like those that these fonts should be used, such a space-saving quality is quite helpful. In terms of areas of design, Paquito will be useful in editorial work, but it may shine even more in design for the gastronomic sector (both in restaurant identities & menu-typesetting, as well as in design for food packaging).