Riacho is a Portuguese word for “creek”. It evokes movement and tranquility. It was in this spirit that I created Riacho: I wanted a typeface that would bring the industrial dynamism of a sans serif while passing the informality and trust of an old friend. Riacho is completely handmade, stylus-designed, charmingly imperfect but with a rational, objective attitude.
Riacho is sans, but its capital letters are serif. The kerning is rigorous, and the ligatures are reduced to the essentials without distractions. The font features a subtly emotive handwriting, which makes it ideal for editorial material for children and young people.
Poems, love letters, food recipes ... everything that is about feelings and sensations looks fresh and elegant dressed in Riacho!
Riacho, for its friendly sobriety, also looks great with scientific texts. Mathematical equations typeset in LaTeX / XeTeX systems have never looked so good, not only on PowerPoint/beamer/OpenOffice slides but also in print. Riacho's x-height is similar to Times Roman and Computer Modern fonts, so typesetting professional equations with both glyph sets together flows naturally (please refer to gallery image #6 for a XeTeX example of a Riacho/Computer Modern combination).
Each Riacho font file contains 559 glyphs, 3354 in the whole family (6 fonts). For best results on screen display (PDFs, presentations, movies), the Semibold family is recommended.