Banzo © Felipe Kaizer
From the same period in which I was designing Inocência I found some drafts of sharp and strong characters; many of them still had drop shaped terminals and curvy curves. Slowly, I worked on the characters trying to maintain the 'strength' despite some of those characteristics; as I became more influenced by Dwiggins, Smeijers and Unger’s typefaces I decided to start to clean it up, reducing some forms until the typeface looks barely humble.
So, after one month of daily work, I abandoned the first gothic version of this typeface, and decided to develop a new solution based only on its basic proportions - which I already assumed before I even started to draw: the set should be as black as possible for a regular weight typeface. I also took a chance sometimes on 90° sharp corners and absolute straight lines, just to see how the font and the text body would react to his decision; I thought a bit about how strange was to conceive a computer typeface from those drawings. I accepted to apply some of those cuts from sharps points, in a matter of adapting to the new media.
It took me another month to finish the basic set. Strangely, the font worked well with Inocência, playing the roll of its bold version, despite the almost opposite formal aspect of the two typefaces.
I called it Banzo: it’s an african word (probably from Kimbundu, one of the languages spoken in Angola) used in the past by slaves in Brazil to designate the homesick feeling. The banzo was dangerous, and was appointed as the direct cause of many suicides. This noum also has other meanings relating to construction tools and parts of beam structures.
February 2008 until now
Regular
Tabular numerals
May 2008
