Piazzolla type system

designed by Juan Pablo del Peral

for Huerta Tipográfica

released in 2020

distributed by Google Fonts

Get the font →

Intended for optimizing the available space in press media and other publications, Piazzolla has a compact appearance which allows for small font sizes and tight leading while achieving solid lines and robust paragraphs.

P iazzolla has a distinctive voice that conveys a personal style, especially in display sizes. It also has great performance and readability in small point sizes and long texts, both for screen and printing.

1. Piazzolla has more than 2300 characters and supports 210+ languages across all continents.

ii It's a versatile family providing users with plenty of features and moods. It spans a wide range of weights and an extensive character set for extended latin, polytonic greek and expert cyrillic1.

2x

Fig 2 Variable fonts

The variable fonts technology offers more granular customization with reduced file sizes.

iii It also supports advanced OpenType features such as small caps, dynamic ligatures and fractions, four set of figures, super and subscript characters, ordinals and language-specific variations for Catalan, Guaraní, Dutch, Turkish, Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Bashkir, among others.

iv Piazzolla is a variable font with two axes –Weight and Optical Size– which allows for better control and precision in the typesetting2. With predefined and custom styles, Piazzolla will help you build solid texts and sharp headlines.

  • smcp Small Capitals
  • ss01 Stylistic Set 1 (Roman numerals)
  • ss03 Stylistic Set 3 (Greek SC adscript iota)
  • ss02 Stylistic Set 2 (Dynamic arrows and triangles)
  • ss04 Stylistic Set 4 (Greek adscript iota)
  • ordn Ordinals
  • subs Subscript
  • sups Superscript
  • liga Standard Ligatures
  • tnum Tabular Figures
  • lnum Lining Figures
  • pnum Proportional Figures
  • onum Oldstyle Figures
  • frac Fractions
  • sinf Scientific Inferiors
  • case Case-Sensitive Forms

This project was named Piazzolla as a tribute to Astor Piazzolla, an Argentine musician, composer and the central figure of the style called Nuevo Tango.

Piazzolla

In my country, presidents change and no one says a word; bishops, cardinals, football players –you name it. But not tango, tango must always remain the same.

En mi país cambian los presidentes y no dicen nada, cambian los obispos, los cardenales, los jugadores de fútbol, cualquier cosa, pero el tango, no. El tango hay que dejarlo así.

1921

mdq

Birth

Piazzolla was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina

He was the only child of Vicente “Nonino” Piazzolla and Asunta Manetti, both children of Italian parents that had immigrated to Mar del Plata at the end of the 19th century. Astor’s early years were difficult. He was born with clubfoot, a defect in his right leg. From the age of two, he had several surgeries.

1924

nyc

Move to the US

Astor Piazzolla moved with his family to New York

The Piazzolla family first settled in Port Reading, New Jersey. Later, they moved to an apartment in Manhattan. Astor adjusted very quickly to the New York life style. When he was seven or eight years old, his father gave him a bandoneon. At home, he would listen to his father’s recordings of the tango orchestras of Carlos Gardel and Julio de Caro, and was exposed to jazz and classical music.

1934

nyc

Gardel

When Piazzolla met Carlos Gardel

In 1934, he met Carlos Gardel, one of the most important figures in the history of tango, and played a cameo role as a paper boy in his movie El día que me quieras. Gardel invited the young bandoneon player to join him on his tour. Despite Piazzolla’s enthusiasm, his father decided that he was not old enough to go along.

1937

bue

Argentina

First orchestras

After his return to Argentina, he stayed in Buenos Aires. Between 1939 and 1944, he was a member of Anibal Troilo’s orchestra both as bandoneonist and arranger. Later, he participated in the Fiorentino Orchestra. During those years, he married Odette María Wolff and they had two children.

1954

par

Nadia Boulanger

Rediscovering tango in Paris

Piazzolla won a contest and with that money traveled to Europe to study classical music in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. He thought his future lay in classical music. When presenting his work to her, Piazzolla performed some of his classically inspired compositions, but it was not until he performed one of his tangos that she congratulated him and encouraged him to continue his career in that genre. He studied classical composition, including counterpoint, which would play a central role in his later tango works.

1955

bue

Killer of tango

In the tango’s vanguard

His biographers indicate that, after his return to Argentina, he was willing to produce a national scandal and to break with the musical traditions of tango at that time. In his new compositions, Piazzolla used all the knowledge he had acquired years before with Ginastera and Boulanger. His work was received with harsh criticism from the more traditional tangueros, who accused Piazzolla of being the killer of tango.

1958

nyc

Back in the US

Tango and Jazz

In 1958 Piazzolla traveled to New York with his family. It was a very difficult period in his career since tango was not known in the United States. In that country, Piazzolla recorded two albums mixing tango and latin-jazz elements. In 1959, during one of his tours, he received the news that his father had died in Argentina. He composed and dedicated his famous composition Adios Nonino to him.

1960

arg

His consecration

Back in Argentina

After his return from New York, Piazzolla began a new period in his musical career. During the 60s and 70s, he formed several musical groups and composed numerous works that achieved worldwide fame. Around those years he recorded an album with Edmundo Correa, with lyrics by the famous writer José Luis Borges. He also worked with famous tango musicians including Amelita Baltar, Horacio Ferrer, and Héctor de Rosas.

1986

par

Last years

Years in Paris

He was awarded for the soundtrack composed for the film El Exilio de Gardel directed by Pino Solanas. By then, Piazzolla had moved to Paris, where he spent his last years of life. As he said in an interview: —Paris is my second homeland, because they understood what they did not understand about me here in Argentina.

1992

bue

Death

Astor Piazzolla’s legacy

In 1990 Piazzolla, suffered a cerebral bleed when he fell in the bathroom of a hotel in Paris. Days later, he was transferred to Buenos Aires, where he finally died on July 4, 1992, at the age of 71. One of his biographers stated: “In Argentina, gradually, his new tango has gained acceptance, and his music has influenced a new generation of tango composers. For much of his life, his music was not considered tango; today, the genre would not be complete without Piazzolla.”

Highlights

ñ

00F1 eñe (ntilde)

H2O

sinf Scientific Inferiors

ss02 -> with Stylistic Set 2 (Dynamic arrows and triangles)

fft

liga Dynamic standard ligatures

@

U+0040 at

U+20BF Bitcoin symbol

U+20AA Shekel symbol

ẫġ

Extended Latin character set

U+20B9 Indian rupee

Ԯб

Extended Cyrillic support

3/8

frac Arbitrary fractions

Дв

Cyrillic localization for Bulgarian, Serbian and more

m2

sups Superscript numbers and letters

Ψπ

Greek (+polytonic) support

&

U+0026 ampersand

vi

ss01 Roman numerals

U+20B4 Hryvnia symbol

3636

Lining and oldstyle numbers, both in proportional and tabular versions

ẞß

U+1E9E Capital sharp S or german Eszett

jíj

Language localizations for Guaraní, Catalán, Dutch, Romanian and more

[o-n] [O-N]

case Case-Sensitive variations

ö

Extensive math character set

U+25B6 Arrows, triangles and useful symbols

ῼΰ

Supports the polytonic Greek orthography Πολυτονικό σύστημα γραφής

Optical scale in type founding

Harry Carter from Typography 4, autumn of 1937

For the purpose of this article it is easiest to classify sizes of type in three groups —large, medium and small. The printer or designer called on to work in one of these size-groups chooses a face that shows up well in it.

Auto optical sizing

Piazzolla improves the text legibility at small sizes. This feature works automatically in all modern browsers.

Plantin, for example, is very popular in small sizes up to 10-point; Imprint is used a great deal in 11-, 12- and 14-point; Fry's Baskerville is a favourite for large display. But there are no typefaces that excel in all three groups—hardly any, in two of them.

Typographers accept the situation, and show their skill by calling for this or that type as the best design for the scale in which they are working. It is no hardship to them to leave unused the many available poor designs in any of the three groups. For the printer, and more especially the typefounder, on the other hand, it is wasteful to make and stock type-faces in unwanted sizes.

Point-size names

Name Point size Milimeters
Diamond 4.5pt 1.588mm
Pearl 5pt ≈1.764mm
Nonpareil 6pt ≈2.117mm
Minion 7pt ≈2.469mm
Brevier 8pt ≈2.822mm
Bourgeois 9pt 3.175mm
Long Primer 10pt ≈3.528mm
Small Pica 11pt ≈3.881mm
Pica 12pt ≈4.233mm
English 14pt ≈4.939mm
Great Primer 18pt 6.350mm

A multiscript family

Greek

Αρμονία (μουσική)

Ο όρος Αρμονία σήμαινε στην αρχαία Ελλάδα γενικά την αρμογή, τη σύνδεση, το ταίριασμα των μερών ενός δομημένου συνόλου (π.χ. των λίθων ενός οικοδομήματος, των ουράνιων σωμάτων στο σύμπαν) και ταυτόχρονα αξιολογούσε θετικά τη συμμετρία, την ευρυθμία, τις σωστές αναλογίες, την τέλεια εφαρμογή των δομικών στοιχείων. Αποτέλεσμα της αρμονίας σύμφωνα με τις αισθητικές λήψεις από αρχαιοτάτων χρόνων ήταν το ωραίο. Στη μουσική χρησιμοποιήθηκε η λέξη ευρύτατα και με διαφορετικές σημασίες.

Greek designed with the help of Panagiotis Haratzopoulos and Sol Matas.

Latin

Harmony (music)

In music, harmony is the process by which the composition of individual sounds, or superpositions of sounds, is analysed by hearing. Usually, this means simultaneously occurring frequencies, pitches (tones, notes), or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the vertical aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic line, or the horizontal aspect.

Cyrillic

Гармония (музыка)

Гармо́ния (др.-греч. ἁρμονία — связь, порядок; строй, лад; слаженность, соразмерность, стройность) — комплекс понятий теории музыки. В научной перспективе это представление приводит к композиционно-техническому понятию гармонии как объединения звуков в созвучия и их закономерного последования. Гармония как научная и учебно-практическая дисциплина изучает звуковысотную организацию музыки — как многоголосной, так и одноголосной.

Cyrillic script designed with the valuable help of Krassen Krestev.

Variable weight

a a a

200

11/mar Birthday71 years lifetime50 Studio Albums11/mar Birthday71 years lifetime50 Studio Albums

11 years Composed his first tango1977 Libertango album released11 years Composed his first tango1977 Libertango album released

750 + works40 Film scores1959 Adios Nonino750 + works40 Film scores1959 Adios Nonino