Parafina
RELEASED BY:
Feliciano Type Foundry ☞
DESIGNERS:
Mário Feliciano
RELEASE DATE:
February 17, 2021
Week 07
DETAILS:
• Parafina is an open countered typographic-system based on geometric shapes of varied widths.
• Available in six weights with three optical sizes for each.
LINKS:
From the Foundry:
“For Parafina’s design, I was inspired by a hand-lettered display-sized alphabet dating back to the mid-20th century, created by the Spanish letterer Miguel Pedraza. But Parafina is not a direct translation of those shapes, nor is the family a revival of Pedraza’s work. Instead, that alphabet acted as a catalyst. Seeing it caused me to reconsider how a working typographic-system based on geometric shapes of varied widths could be built.
While Parafina has feet in the past, its eyes are on the future. The typeface is sophisticated and contemporary. It has six upright weights. Even though I designed Parafina for use in display sizes, each weight has three different optically-sized fonts on offer, named S, M and L. As these small, medium, and large designations suggest, the optical sizes are optimized for specific size ranges. Even though all the fonts are intended for use in big sizes already, the larger your type will be, the less space you need between the characters. Layout applications like Adobe InDesign enable users to track text to a wider or narrower setting, but that only adds or subtracts the same amount of space between every letter. Parafina’s three optical sizes per weight have different amounts of inter-character spacing, meaning that they provide better solutions than an application’s automatic settings can produce.”
