Everyone has that friend: the one who excels at everything they set their mind to, turns all the heads, and gets undue attention but can back it up with charm. Brinca is that friend.
Alexander Wright and Rodrigo Fuenzalida designed Brinca with Michu Benaim Steiner for In-House Int’l foundry, the type foundry of Austin, TX-based brand consultancy In-House International. It was developed by Rodrigo Fuenzalida at FragType.
Branding—as a concept, how it’s used—is an ever-evolving space, and distinctive type is emerging as a clear expressive advantage.
Michu Benaim Steiner
Brinca started as an experiment to create a single typeface across two opposites—with a practical, everyday neutral in between. We set out to test what could be the future of brand typeface: all-in-one files that integrate tonal range into brand design. The team discovered new possibilities for display-type design.
The studio describes Brinca as a “full-spectrum typeface with emotional range and a dynamic heart.” Named after the Spanish word for ‘jump,’ Brinca spans from tightly coiled springs to bouncy and rotund.
Rodrigo Fuenzalida, who collaborated on the design and developed the typeface, clarifies that while he depended on calibration techniques in its development, the key to Brinca was fine-tuned design transitions. “The value of meticulous design was very clear here. Setting up the characters to morph between such different states resulted in some very, very ugly in-between states. The careful planning of those transitions in the designs—as an animation—was the key technical breakthrough,” said Fuenzalida.
The Brinca family includes six styles: Sans, Regular, two Jagged styles, two Bouncy styles, and a complement of glyphs and Latin diacritics. We were struck by how dynamic and unique each expression is. Can it be used to design an entire library’s worth of book covers? The answer is yes! The studio tried it, but you must take their word for it.
Brand identities will sing with Brinca, but it’s also a perfect expression for packaging, events promotions, merch, product lines, and much more. “Brinca is our most technically ambitious typeface to date, the result of a year’s worth of design and development. In creating it, we envisioned a use case that’s both speculative and within reach right now. Branding—as a concept, how it’s used—is an ever-evolving space, and distinctive type is emerging as a clear expressive advantage. Brands will need to build in structured versatility compatible with AI implementation, and Brinca is an extreme test of that concept,” said designer Michu Benaim Steiner.
Brinca is a highly versatile and variable typeface that makes a statement. The statement is up to you. Check out Brinca here and on MyFonts.