Sastre — María Ramos

Eleven years. Ramos began Sastre as a student at Reading in 2014, and NM Type — the foundry she runs with Noel Pretorius — is only now putting it out. The letterforms come from the drawings her father made on fabric in the tailor's workshop her parents ran for more than forty years; the broken structure of those marks became the structure of the face. Five weights, a variable, 663 glyphs, and a set of 25 stitches that work as geometric shapes for building borders and patterns — the family trade shipped as a working typographic system rather than a mood board. Small caps are set monospaced, so the family carries a second voice inside it. Warde called type the clothes words wear; most designers quote the line. This one earned it, and it is arriving with almost no noise around it.