Say hello to Aguzzo, Displaay’s carved serif inspired by Italian type

When Danish type designer Kasper Pyndt Rasmussen first sketched Aguzzo in 2015, he created a single weight that loosely referenced Alessandro Butti and Aldo Novarese’s 1951 Augustea from Fonderia Nebiolo. Nearly a decade later, that solitary style has evolved into a comprehensive seven-weight family, thanks to a collaboration with Displaay that expands the typeface whilst refining its most distinctive features. Augustea, an engraver’s typeface built on Roman capitals, carried notable quirks – triangular punctuation and an enclosed figure two amongst them. Aguzzo nods to these characteristics through alternate stylistic sets, but the connection ends there. Where Augustea remained rooted in classical proportions, Aguzzo fuses rigorously carved geometry with transitional traits, creating something that stands firmly on its own. “Originality,” explains Displaay’s Martin Vácha, describing what initially drew him to the typeface. “Despite its Italian predecessor, Kasper brought a strong sense of character to the design.” The typeface’s sharp expression finds particular contrast in its italics, which sit at a steep sixteen-degree angle. These introduce broad-nib flourishes that deliberately counter the upright styles’ geometric precision. It’s a pairing that shouldn’t work on paper – carved angles meeting calligraphic curves – yet the combination gives Aguzzo unusual flexibility across sizes and contexts. Rasmussen’s background partly explains this hybrid approach. Educated at a Rudolf Steiner School that emphasised creative work and handcrafts alongside academics, he later studied visual communication in Copenhagen with a focus on publication design. Type design emerged as a calmer, more therapeutic counterpoint to his other work. “Compared to publication and mainly identity design, type design felt calm, slow and almost therapeutic,” he notes. “The fact that it offered a direct route to publishing my own work at minimal cost made it all the more appealing.”