About ITC Portago
Luis Siquot likes to make unusual typefaces that can be read in text and that also work well at display sizes. ITC Portago is a strong, bold alphabet of caps and slightly smaller caps. It’s a stencil face, based on lettering painted onto crates and luggage and steel plates, and the white lines through the letters represent the bits of the stencil itself that have been left uncut. “My intention drawing Portago,” says Siquot, “was to obtain a neutral, classical, very condensed grotesque stencil shape that is readable in text sizes, showing at the same time the ’movement’ produced by the nicked edges. And of course the more obvious rough effect in headline sizes.” He intends Portago to look at though it was stenciled onto an unpolished or rustic wooden box. At small sizes, Portago works best with slightly looser letterspacing, as capital letter combinations usually do. The font includes numerals in both the full-caps and small-caps sizes. |
