Tambau is a display typeface crafted by Matheus “Fio” Gonçalves, a Brazilian design student, still in college, inspired by Brazilian concert urban posters and wood type that I saw at the Oficina Tipográfica São Paulo. The font was first made for a magazine project in design school, making it beautiful on giant pages headlines, billboards, signs, etc. There’s no lowercase, the character set is dramatic and objective. The uppercase is actually expanded letterforms causing some eyes and breathing paths to the very condensed and very modular glyphs, which creates a quite interesting striped texture between form, counterform and spacing. The lots of ligatures come to give it more closure between the letters, when they try to form blank spaces. So do the diacritics, fitting in the space given to them by the dynamic letterforms, making dense rectangular blocks. You may use Tambau as big as you can or do a high tracking to it and still it will be pretty. The titles can be dynamic, just condensed or just large. It’s on your own. Don’t be afraid to play with Tambau, it’s an alive typography. Curiosity: For the magazine in design school, the pilot project of Tambau was cut in a MDF board, to print it with texture and paint. Later was added more characters, languages and special glyphs to it. Set: Tambau is a singular font typeface, with extended and condensed characters, numbers, ligatures, punctuation and symbols for Basic, Western, Central and South Eastern Latin languages.