Africa. An Artist’s Safari by Fred Krakowiak

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.