Salsa

Try Salsa

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Salsa Regular

About Salsa

Salsa is a display typeface whose lowercase follows the structure of an italic while standing almost upright. The strokes are thick with rounded ends and swelling curves, the mark of the flat round brush on which the design is based, and letters such as a, e and k end in upturned exit strokes. John Vargas Beltrán took the idea from album covers of the 1970s and named the face after the main musical genre of Latin America; the official notes add that he wanted to avoid grunge, vernacular and decorated clichés. Salsa was his final project in a postgraduate typography course at the University of Buenos Aires and includes swash capitals. The family has one Regular style with 331 glyphs covering basic Latin, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Salsa works

Record sleeves and gig posters

The design starts from 1970s LP covers, so a band name or an album title is its home ground.

Food and drink packaging

Thick brush strokes with rounded ends give a product name a hand-painted warmth on a label.

Restaurant and bar menus

Section titles in the single Regular style stand out above a plainer text face.

Short headings on the web

The official notes recommend Salsa for titles and short texts, where the italic rhythm stays easy to read.

Wordmarks

Swash capitals are part of the font and give the first letter of a name extra movement.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan

Character sets found in the files: latin. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with Salsa

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use Salsa on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Salsa";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Salsa-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Salsa", sans-serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Salsa with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Salsa&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

One style

Salsa has a single Regular style and is not a variable font. There is no lighter cut or separate upright.

No percent sign

The character set skips U+0025, so the specimen shows a gap where the percent sign would be.

Basic Latin only

Latin Extended is not included, so the alphabets of Polish, Czech and Turkish are incomplete.

Reserved name

The copyright notice reserves the font name Salsa for the original; modified versions need another name unless permission is given.

FAQs

Collections with Salsa

• Mid-century display fonts from the 1950s to the 1970s

  Bouncing, hand-lettered display faces after post-war advertising, cartoons, motel signs and record covers.

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All display fonts