Otta
Pampatype · Francisco Gálvez Pizarro · 2015
A large, hand-drawn humanist serif by Francisco Gálvez Pizarro, designed for multi-script book work across Latin, Cyrillic and Greek.
About
Drawn with a calligraphic rhythm and an organic horizontal contrast informed by Arabic and Greek scribal traditions, Otta was created specifically to set Gálvez Pizarro's own typography book 'Hacer y Componer', requiring harmonious composition across multiple scripts on a single page. The family spans 28 styles across text and display optical sizes, with a PanEuro edition extending coverage to complete Cyrillic, polytonic and archaic Greek, and Coptic. It won at the Modern Cyrillic contest in 2019, and its character sets run to nearly 5,000 glyphs per font in the PE upright cuts.
Classification
Otta synthesises calligraphic and typographic forms with an organic, hand-drawn quality and humanist construction. Its horizontal contrast draws on Arabic and Greek scribal traditions, placing it firmly in the humanist serif category.