For this week’s All for the Gram, we chose an all-Italian Instagram profile: Font Populista was opened in 2019 by Strickner, a graphic designer and art director from Rome, and has the focus on an element that has been populating the streets of our cities and towns for so long. 

If you notice (yes, you will from now on), on most shop windows, on the doors of businesses and offices, we find signs and writings with a very particular and characteristic font. This is one of the most popular typefaces in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s, when many businesses decided to use these adhesive letters to make up their signs and lettering. 

No one knows who really came up with this font, but scrolling through Font Populista’s profile we can say with certainty that in many cases it would have been better to turn to a professional. The result is that our streets are full of misaligned, incomplete and crooked lettering. 

But it doesn’t end there. In addition to collecting the best testimonials of use of this typeface, Font Populista has created a vector reconstruction of the alphabet and on the official website you can download the font for free and use it for your own documents and writings.