Basque Lettering

December 13, 2022

Speaking of lettering, walking around our first night in Donostia-San Sebastián I noticed a typeface I’d never seen before:

A storefront sign written in Basque with large, bold yellow letters on a black background

I don’t have much of a typographic vocabulary, but to my untrained eye the weight gives it a serious presence, but the flared serifs give it a bit of playfulness as well. Nice touch for a neighborhood spot!

To my surprise and delight, I saw it a variation of it again shortly thereafter — it’s the A that really catches the eye.

A storefront sign written in Basque with large, bold gold letters on a black background. The A characters have a crossbar on top, a bit like a hat.

It turns out this style is pervasive around town: shops, bars, restaurants, even boats in the marina, all sporting the same bold, all-caps lettering.

A tavern sign written in Basque with large, bold white letters on a black background. The 'feet' of each letter flares out at the bottom, giving a kind of sturdy appearance.

It seems to be used exclusively on signage written in Basque, so I did a quick search to see if it was just something local to the city — which seemed possible, if unlikely — or if there was a larger connection to the language itself.

Sure enough, Thierry Arsaut‘s Basque Fonts site suggests the lettering style dates as far back as the Middle Ages, descending from Roman engravings:

At that time, the Basque engravers knew very little about the Roman ironworks technique; their rough tools couldn't carve deep characters like in the sculptures coming from Rome. So, instead of carving deeply, they scraped the stone around the characters which thus stuck out, creating a new technique.

It regained popularity in the 1930s, and was eventually resurrected as a series of modern typefaces.

A restaurant sign written in Basque with large, bold yellow letters on a black background.

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