Born in 1945, Luis Siquot was a typographic designer and the proprietor of siquot'design in Córdoba, Argentina. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he released several of his typeface designs through ITC. This included Portago, a stencil sans with rough contours, Abaton, a shaded face in the spirit of engraved styles used on 19th-century banknotes and postage stamps, and Florinda, a gothic ornamented with knobs much like a wood typeface from the 1850s. Cali is a calligraphic script made with an Osmiroid pen specially designed for lefties like Siquot was.

His magnum opus arguably is the Juanita series. This design was dearest to his heart – at least Siquot chose to show a graphic with glyphs from its various styles on the homepage of his siquot'types. The typeface family was introduced in the Winter 1996 issue of U&lc magazine:

The idea for ITC Juanita took shape during a long international flight on which Argentinian-born designer Luis Siquot was “reading” a novel narrated only with woodcuts. ITC Juanita is actually a series of six typefaces which Siquot calls a personal reinterpretation of some designs that originated in the 1930s and ’40s and were still popular during his childhood in the 1950s. “For me, Juanita is like a toy—charming, expressive and also dramatic,” he says.

While designing ITC Juanita, Siquot took advantage of the digital tools that allow designers to apply color to different parts of a letterform. This series offers designers a range of variations based on similar structures, each with a unique twist.

In 2007, book designer Sandy Bell used it as the titling typeface for Africa. An Artist’s Safari by Fred Krakowiak. The horizontally hatched Juanita Xilo serves on the jacket and the cover, accompanied by House Industries’ Neutraface. The foil-stamped spine lettering and some of the big initials inside the book additionally feature Juanita’s plain style. The text typeface is Robert Slimbach’s Adobe Jenson.

Fellow Argentine type designer Ramiro Espinoza of Retype Foundry informed the community at typo.social that Luis Siquot passed away on June 1, 2025. Rest in peace.

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Australia is a 2008 epic romantic historical drama film directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. The story is set between 1939 and 1942.

The title design brings together a number of fonts that echo this period: Radiant is a stressed sans serif designed by Robert H. Middleton for Ludlow between 1938 and 1941. Famous Label (Harold’s Fonts, 2001) is inspired by a piece of pen lettering found in J.B. Russell’s Alphabets: Ancient & Modern from 1945. The upright script is similar to Glenmoy (Stephenson Blake, 1932).

ITC Juanita (1996) is Luis Siquot’s “personal reinterpretation of some designs that originated in the 1930s and ’40s and were still popular during his childhood in the 1950s.” (U&lc Vol. 23 No. 3). It is paired with Black Tie (Scholtz Fonts, 2007), a loose reinterpretation of Bernhard Fashion (ATF, 1929).

The movie logo itself is probably custom and not based on a font. The sans-serif letterforms with pronounced contrast and abrupt changes from thick to thin recall Art Deco types like Ultra-Modern (Ludlow, 1928) or Modernique (ATF, 1928).