Sagarana is a typeface project that was initially inspired by a Brazilian book cover from 50's. The name itself combines the words “saga” (as in the English sense of “story”) and “rana,” a Tupi word (Indigenous language) that roughly means “showing similarities”. 

The book Sagarana was written by João Guimarães Rosa in 1946, who also created that name. The cover which was the initial inspiration for this project was designed by the Brazilian artist Tomás Santa Rosa for its third edition, published in 1951. Although the lettering designed by Santa Rosa had a lack of regularity it has much personality.

Basically, the letters "a" and “n” from that lettering were the initials basis for this project. Once those letters have only few elements needed to design the entire characters set, I had to make my own decisions which made the typeface design original.

The Guimarães Rosa’s stories are fantastical and full of regionalism. Most of them were set in the hinterland of Minas Gerais, Brazil, a very culturally rich place with a peculiar landscape. So, besides the lettering on the book cover, the stories and the place were also, in someway, inspirations to conceptualize and to design the Sagarana Family.

Sagarana is an elegant display typeface rooted in the style of romantic or didones letterforms, however it is a sans serif with a cleaner appearance. The contrast and the vertical stress maintain the modern style, while the terminals, the finials, the proportions and the narrow look enhance its stylish personality. 

It is a professional typeface project with three weights (Regular, SemiBold and Bold) and it has an extensive character set that cover the romance languages such as Portuguese, Romanian and French, and also some of Indo-European languages as German, Lithuanian and Turkish.