Grapixoso Font Family

Grapixoso is a typeface that celebrates the most prevalent vernacular typography in our cities: pixação. A transgressive and entirely Brazilian style of writing. It doesn’t ask for permission, nor does it try to be pleasant, legible, or easily digestible. It takes its place in tight spaces, with no breathing room, always striving to reach the highest point to display the name of whoever wrote it. Although often looked down upon, it is everywhere, shouting for attention, impossible to ignore.

Popular among youth from the urban periphery, it is accessible and disregards all conventional typographic rules. With a wide variety of forms of representation, it is a style that is easy to write but complex to understand. The issue here is not the morality of pixação, but rather the fact that, within marginality, Brazilians created something unique and characteristic, making it an icon of urban culture.

When I was younger, my first contact with typography came from drawing straight tags in notebooks with friends, exploring their forms and developing a taste for a kind of writing that diverged from traditional school handwriting. I believe pixação is a Brazilian typographic cultural heritage. That’s why I decided to make the Grapixoso typeface available for free, for both personal and commercial use. If it is free to circulate on the streets, it should also be free to be reproduced as a font.