Contrafonts is the type practice of Joaquín Contreras Soto — a Chilean designer living in Fichtenau, a small village in Baden-Württemberg, where he makes typefaces and synthesizers.
His work is inseparable from the punk and DIY culture of Santiago de Chile. Screen printing, photocopied fanzines, hand-painted street lettering — that was the design school. From there he moved into independent publishing, becoming part of the collectives that brought fanzine and contraculture into contact with literature, and built what Chile now calls the microeditoriales movement. Estudio Navaja — founded with Nico Sagredo, Camila Jouannet and Pablo Delcielo — was one of those references: punk, editorial design and visual identity as the same practice. He currently works as type designer for Carbón Libros, an independent publishing house to come out of that generation.
A running thread through all of it is Mauricio Amster — the Polish-Spanish refugee who transformed Chilean book culture in the mid-twentieth century. Joaquín’s degree project was a revival of Amster’s calligraphic lettering, one of the first times that work had been approached typographically. The research has continued since: he edited and wrote the prologue for Recuerdos de un bibliófilo, a collection of Amster’s own texts published by Carbón Libros.
The other side is book design and European type — legibility, modular grids, the discipline of working at a small scale with very little margin for error. Both sides inform each other.
He belongs to a generation that built type design as a field in Chile — releasing open source typefaces in the early 2000s, before it was a course in any design school, before it was anything at all. Teaching came with it: Universidad de Chile, Universidad Diego Portales and Universidad del Desarrollo, across Santiago, Concepción and Valparaíso.
Trained at the Plantin Institute of Typography in Antwerp. Selected three times at Tipos Latinos — Romances in 2008, CF Santiago in 2018, and CF Cumbia in the 10th Biennial 2026. Jury representative for Chile at the 7th Tipos Latinos Biennial, 2016. His work is documented in Historia del Diseño Gráfico en Chile (Ediciones Fulgor, 2026). Lectures and workshops in Chile, Bolivia, Mexico, Slovakia and Portugal.
Some typefaces are available through Fontfabric and W Type Foundry. The rest live here.
Contact: joaquin@contrafonts.cl
2026 © Joaquín Contreras • Based in Baden-Württemberg, Germany.
Webdesign and code by http://www.apunte.studio