New Naipe Foundry’s ‘Urca’ brings warm sophistication to brand typography
41 minutes ago
3 min read
Print Solutions Packaging Solutions
Named after a corner of Rio de Janeiro steeped in golden age glamour, a new typeface offers beauty and fashion brands an alternative to formal luxury and generic minimalism.
Beauty has spent years balancing aspiration with accessibility. Consumers want expertise without the elitism, excellent products without the premium price tag and brands that connect with them. Now, Naipe Foundry is bringing that shift into typography with Urca, a new typeface designed to give beauty, cosmetics and fashion brands a sophisticated, expressive and warm voice.
Developed by Brazilian designers Álvaro Franca and Felipe Casaprima at the Barcelona based foundry, Urca takes its name from a small peninsula where Rio’s mid century glamour still feels tangible. Its distinctive combination of high contrast strokes and softened, rounded details draws on the elegance of fashion typography without the sharp edges and distance often associated with luxury branding.
The result is a typeface that feels polished but approachable, designed for a generation of brands that want to communicate quality without sacrificing personality.
The old rules of beauty branding are being rewritten. Consumers move between prestige and mass market products, scrutinise ingredients and discover new brands through social feeds and recommendations. Legacy and authority alone are no longer enough. Brands need to build trust through expertise, transparency and a voice that feels relevant to the people they want to reach.
But visual identity has not always kept pace. In recent years, the beauty and fashion sectors have swung between soft, rounded typography that can lack distinction and austere minimalism that signals exclusivity but risks feeling impersonal. Urca was created to offer another option.
‘Brands are talking to a younger audience in a more colloquial tone of voice. Communication isn’t top down any more,’ said Álvaro Franca, executive director of Naipe.
‘A typeface is the visual tone of voice of your brand, and the shape of the letters changes how people read the copy. This space has relied either on chunky, soft, round forms or ‘colder’ luxury. We wanted to put something right in the middle.’
For beauty brands in particular, that middle ground matters more and more. A typeface can help a brand feel expert without being intimidating, premium and contemporary without being exclusive. It is part of how a brand expresses what it stands for, from the first impression on the shelf to the small print on its packaging or the words on its website.
Urca also arrives at a moment when the visual language of luxury is shifting. After years where fashion houses and premium brands embraced pared back, often interchangeable sans serifs, there’s renewed interest in expressive lettering and heritage inspired design.
‘There is a different way to portray elegance,’ said Álvaro. ‘Think beautiful ready to wear rather than sharp stilettos.’
Urca’s strong contrast between thick and thin strokes gives it the visual drama associated with fashion mastheads, while softened letterforms lend it a more relaxed character.
As AI makes it easier and faster to generate visual content, standing out is becoming more difficult. The risk is that brands end up with an abundance of material but fewer recognisable visual cues to distinguish them from competitors.
Typography offers a way to build consistency into a brand’s communication. Used across packaging, digital platforms, campaigns and editorial content, a distinctive typeface can help create a recognisable identity even as the messages and formats change.
‘AI delivers speed, but it doesn’t deliver consistency, and without consistency you’re not building trust,’ said Álvaro. ‘Typography is how your copy sounds in the minds of your audience. If you have a unique typography, you have a unique voice.’
Urca is available through Adobe Fonts at no additional cost to Creative Cloud subscribers, as well as from Naipe’s own store (see below). Naipe’s direct multi-platform licence covers desktop, web and app use in one bundle. Designers at agencies in Naipe’s Studio Partner programme, including Koto, Droga5, JKR, Vasava and Pentagram, already have the family.
What you need to know…
Designer: Naipe Foundry, Barcelona.
Classification: High contrast sans serif.
Design character: Fashion led elegance, softened details and a warm, approachable feel.
Weights: Nine – Thin, Extralight, Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, Extrabold and Black.
Formats: Static and variable fonts.
Language support: More than 200 Latin script languages, including minority languages across Europe and Africa.
Ornaments: A fleuron and a manicule for packaging and editorial applications.
OpenType features: Alternates, standard ligatures, case sensitive forms, fractions, oldstyle and tabular figures, ordinals, single storey a, slashed zero and superscripts.
Designed for real world use: Thin strokes are sturdier than in classic high contrast faces such as Didot or Bodoni, so Urca stays crisp at small sizes. Generous default spacing supports smaller text, while tighter spacing can be used for display work.
Licensing: Included with Creative Cloud subscriptions via Adobe Fonts. Direct licences from Naipe start at €50 per weight or €300 for the full family, with desktop, web and app use included.
Availability:
