Jillian Mcintosh

A playful caricature of a midcentury grotesque, Guzzo is a fresh addition to the Monotype Library. Somewhat eccentric and full of surprises, its unmistakable quirk can be found on closer inspection, stemming from details proudly borrowed from brush lettering and calligraphy.

The wide range of weights and style can take you through any design space, from the condensed weights squeezing in larger headlines or dense blocks of text with the condensed range, to experimenting with small point sizes, labels or packaging with the extended cut. However, Guzzo’s real charm is probably best expressed through its wonderfully playful shapes, its unusual 'laid-back italics' feature cursive forms and a backslant. The different stylistic sets allow you to decide what you make of Guzzo, with several sets of alternate glyphs steering it in any direction you want.

Guzzo is a happy-go-lucky character, and has a warm, humble and painterly quality that - at a glance - may be unrecognizable as a typeface. It can almost pass for hand-lettering. Guzzo pairs exceptionally well with scripts and slab typefaces, and feels most at home in situ with toys, packaging, menus, broadcasting, cartoons and merchandising! Guzzo encourages you to turn up the silliness and is for designers who want to emulate hand-painted and casual motifs.

Taking its name from American artist Jeremy Pinc, aka the painter Guzzo Pinc, the typeface channels the quirky, funny and poignant qualities of his paintings - with wacky characters, loosely painted geometric forms and bright colors.

For this mid century, authentic, nostalgic typeface - the story is really what you make of it.

Described as “An extended script type that lends itself well to fine fashion, ready-to-wear and all quality merchandise” in a marketing blurb pitching Beaufont by the Morgan Sign Machine Company of Chicago for their Line-O-Scribe sign printing system. This advertising script font was originally manufactured exclusively for Morgan Sign under license by the Hamilton Wood Type Manufacturing Company.

The source patterns and original artwork for this typeface exist in the archives of the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum, and were used for this fresh digitization of this font. This digital take includes alternate letters as originally designed in the mid-century wood type version, and now includes a full extended latin character set with over 350 characters.