Add Caacupé

[davelab6]

Font Project Git Repo URL:

https://github.com/googlefonts/caacupe by @MagdalenaAlonso

Note the family name is ideally Caacupé, including the accent, like https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Ole

Super short description of the Font Family:

From the designer:

Caacupe began during my type design postgraduate program, born from observing the visual environment of Villa de Emergencia 21-24, an informal settlement in the Barracas neighborhood of Buenos Aires. It is a condensed, heavy display face, intended for headlines and short texts at large sizes. I wanted to translate two things from the neighborhood into type: the hand-painted, brush-lettered signage of its local shops, and the bold, high-impact graphic language of popular tabloid newspapers. That is why its terminals carry a subtle hint of the brush and its overall color is deliberately heavy.

One aspect is central to the project: Villa 21-24 is home to a large Paraguayan community, for whom Guaraní is a first or second language. I designed the typeface with that reality in mind, paying specific attention to the letters that appear most frequently in Guaraní (such as "y" and "v") and to the language's particular marks, so that text sets harmoniously. It also includes broad Latin coverage: the full Spanish set, extended Latin, currency symbols, fractions, mathematical signs, and ligatures. It was developed in Glyphs.

The typeface is currently complete in a single style that is visually a Bold weight. The project presentation (Caacupe-Presentacion.pdf) documents the full process: research, sketches, the character set, the Guaraní development, and examples in use. It is currently in Spanish, but in brief it walks through how the neighborhood's painted street lettering and its Paraguayan and Guaraní community shaped each design decision.

The project vision is something I've seen for twenty years working with and alongside vulnerable communities: a quiet gap in design, communication and even public policy, where we solve problems for people whose context we never actually observe up close. The "from inside" rarely happens.

Caacupé came out of fieldwork, not taste. In 2014 I studied the three newspapers circulating in Villa 21-24. All were made by professionals, set in technically correct typefaces (Helvetica, Century, Zine Sans), and all were, in a way, culturally mute. The neighborhood spoke another visual language: walls painted by brush, letters working as images before they work as text, a logic shaped by readers living under daily urgency. Caacupé was designed from inside that context rather than toward it, and with Guaraní, a living language for tens of thousands of people there, treated as a first-class citizen rather than an afterthought.

That's the vision: not just a display face, but giving a more formal visual voice to expressions that rarely get one. There are very few typefaces born from situated research in an informal settlement, and fewer still available openly. I am very happy to see Caacupé is now one of them, and on Google Fonts licensed under the Open Font License.

Requirements:

By opening this issue, I confirm the project meets the following requirements:

• The entire font project is available in a Github repository (repo) and licensed under the OFL
• The source files are available in the repo
• She is the sole copyright author of the entire project, or all other copyright authors have licensed their work to me under the OFL, and I commit to clearly disclosing if AI tools were used in the creation of this project.
• There are no "Reserved Font Names" in the OFL license information, or in the project documentation of any known upstream projects. If there are RFNs, they are not used in whole or in part in this family name, or, I want to discuss how Google can work with my use of them.
• The family name is unique according to namecheck.fontdata.com
• The name of the font family expected to appear on app menus must be very clearly communicated and definitive. It should not include any copyright holder's full names or acronyms.
• The font supports at least the Google Fonts 'Latin Core' glyphset from github.com/googlefonts/glyphsets (direct link)
• [] The repo has the Google Fonts preferred upstream repo structure
• I have read, agree with, and comply with, the full Google Fonts contributing requirements
• I will maintain the repository and participate in the onboarding process (addressing, solving, and responding to issues, merging pull requests, etc)

Image:

from https://github.com/googlefonts/caacupe/blob/main/documentation/Caacupe-Presentacion.pdf