With his typefaces at Fuerte, Fermín Guerrero proves that you need to know the rules to break them

For Type Designer Fermín Guerrero, challenging the conventions of type design is where the fun’s at. His type design studio, Fuerte, is an experimental playground, where, quite often, he throws out the rule book to embrace a creative approach that follows his intuition. “I don’t aim to have all the answers before I start working on a typeface; instead, I allow myself to explore different directions and see how far a project can go,” he tells us. The result is a studio with a five-member strong family of typefaces, each different from the other. Whether it’s starting to craft a typeface from the ‘wrong’ end of the process, or deliberately challenging sacred rules of the discipline, Guerrero likes to go his own way. And he does so quite successfully – his typefaces have been published by prestigious foundries and have been racking up international awards quite swiftly. Here, we catch up with Guerrero to get a closer look into the workings of his one-man shop, and also get to meet his freshest release, Impura. RB: Hi, Fermín! How are things at your end?