Olas © 2024 by Grace Luxton is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Usage implies acceptance of these terms.

Olas, Grace Luxton

Font usage guidelines

1. Made for movement. Set type vertically, horizontally, diagonally. Vary the baseline. Wave, sway, march, dance.

2. Designed to amplify. Scale it up. Layer for impact. Great for display.

3. Created for conversation. Use alternate characters to write in English or Spanish. Add star glyphs for extra joy.

Historical background of neighborhood

Humboldt Park is a community on the Northwest side of Chicago, named in the late 1860s after German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. The neighborhood, which surrounds its eponymous 207-acre park, is framed by Western Avenue and Pulaski Road to its east and west, and by North Avenue and the Union Pacific railway tracks to north and south. The community was annexed to the city of Chicago in 1869, just two years before fire devastated the city. Chicagoans were eager to flee congested, industrial downtown areas in favor of greenery and low property costs farther west; park and transit development through the 1880s encouraged the neighborhood’s continued growth. (1) Today, around 55,000 Chicagoans call Humboldt Park home. (2)

Alexander von Humboldt didn’t design Humboldt Park, or ever visit Chicago. Rather, the invocation of the German explorer’s name is the first of many clues in Humboldt Park’s built environment to the distinct migration waves of ethnic groups to the neighborhood through the 19th and 20th centuries. When Chicago’s West Park Commission opened Humboldt Park and later installed a statue of von Humboldt in 1892, the surrounding neighborhood was largely German and Scandinavian. In 1901, Humboldt Park’s Scandinavian population installed a statue of Leif Erickson. Shortly after, in 1904, Polish residents erected a statue of Thaddeus Kosciuszko, continuing the tradition of Humboldt Park communities marking the park with national representation. (3)

By the 1950s, Latin American and African American Chicagoans began trickling into Humboldt Park as European residents moved away from the neighborhood. From 1950 to 1960, Puerto Rican migration to Chicago increased exponentially. Not only were Puerto Ricans moving to Humboldt Park directly from Puerto Rico, but also from Chicago neighborhoods facing gentrification and re-zoning. (4) Some residents were pushed out of northeast neighborhoods like Lincoln Park and Old Town; others were displaced from neighborhoods leveled to make way for a new UIC campus and Kennedy expressway. (5)

In June of 1966, during the first city-sponsored celebration of Puerto Rican culture in Chicago, a white police officer shot a Puerto Rican participant, 20-year-old Aracelis Cruz, in the leg. The violence prompted an uprising by residents against the police for three days, a moment later referred to as the Division Street riots. (6) The uprising shone light on the power struggle between the Latino residents of Humboldt Park and the oppressive forces controlling and displacing them, which catalyzed collective community organizing efforts. In the wake of the uprising, multiple groups formed to work toward better education, employment, and housing for Puerto Rican Chicagoans, including the Young Lords, a Humboldt Park gang that pivoted their efforts to political advocacy. (7) In 1995, two 60-foot tall sculptures of a waving Puerto Rican flag were installed to commemorate the continued influence of the community on the city, adding to the time-honored tradition of monumental tributes to the cultural communities of Humboldt Park. (8)

Though Puerto Rican residents no longer make up a majority of Humboldt Park’s population, the neighborhood remains a symbolic center of Puerto Rican culture. When exploring the neighborhood in 2024, a few visual trends that appear in archival documentation of the neighborhood still hold true: tributes to Puerto Rican heritage through indigenous Caribbean art styles, 19th-century architecture in conversation with contemporary street art, and perhaps most notably, an omnipresence of national flags. From restaurant windows to bumper stickers, parade floats to political protest signs, the Puerto Rican flag evokes a sense of community and pride across the neighborhood, often seen alongside other national flags to convey solidarity and shared values. The largest flags, waving over Division Street in towering steel, don’t just figuratively emanate the resilience of Chicago’s Puerto Rican community—they also delineate Paseo Boricua, the only designated Puerto Rican historic district in the United States. (9)

Research Conclusions

As an outsider to the community, I found the task of identifying the unique characteristics of the Humboldt Park neighborhood and transforming that inspiration into letterforms challenging. As a resident of the Logan Square neighborhood, I was already familiar with the decades-long trends of gentrification and whitewashing through Chicago’s Northwest side. (10) But only after I began this assignment did I understand how inextricably tied the Humboldt Park neighborhood is to Chicago’s Puerto Rican community. To reference the neighborhood without nodding to the decades of fervent activism of community members toward maintaining it as a center of Puerto Rican culture would feel like erasure.

Instead, I aimed to create a typeface that honored a distinct visual element of the neighborhood that could be reflected through letterforms. I found that element in the neighborhood’s colorful greeting: the two massive monuments that bookend Humboldt Park’s Paseo Boricua (roughly translated as the Puerto Rican walkway). Paseo Boricua, a title only recently adopted by the city after years as a colloquial title (11), is not just a hub for Puerto Rican businesses, restaurants, and community-led nonprofits, but also unique—it’s the only state-recognized Puerto Rican enclave in the contiguous US. (12) The monuments, designated as a Chicago landmark in 2022, depict undulating Puerto Rican flags that hug the street in towering steel. (13) Past the monuments, I continued to see the waving flag everywhere: depicted in public art (14), referenced in historical community publications (15), or flown from windows of public and private buildings throughout the neighborhood.(16)

During my undergraduate training in journalism, it was common for new students to declare their wish to be a “voice for the voiceless.” This refrain was immediately countered when they stepped into the classroom—everyone has a voice, a writer decides who to use their words to amplify. A type designer’s output parallels this insight. Rather than speak on behalf of others, the type designer shares new letters to be composed into another speaker’s words. I hope that this type can be used to spread messages of compassion and celebration, resistance and determination; that the letters become more flags to wave with pride.

Design Method/Typographic Characteristics

Olas is designed to wave, echoing the ripples of a flag in motion. Instead of flowing in one direction, each letter’s curve is designed as half concave and half convex. This way, when the letterforms are placed side by side, the act of joining letters together creates the waving effect: one letter’s downward motion flows into the next letter’s upward movement, and so on and so forth.

To achieve this movement, letters were composed on a grid made of straight vertical lines and waving horizontal lines. Letterforms with strong horizontal lines (terminals, arms and crossbars) thus took on a waving motion when manipulated to fit the grid, whereas straight stems maintained their verticality to balance the waviness of the horizontal lines and elicit the imagery of a flag rooted by its pole. Rounder letters were composed modularly to convey flag shapes through their negative space and counters. The standardized double-wave of each letter, coupled with the characters’ uniform width and straight vertical edges, allows for the curving letterforms to fit together both horizontally and vertically.

The final outcome of Olas (meaning waves in Spanish) is a bold, sans-serif display typeface that ripples across the page, paying homage to the waving flags of Humboldt Park.

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Letters Beyond Form is part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities. This project is funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Notes

1. Badillo, David A. “Humboldt Park.” In Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago: Chicago History Museum and the Newberry Library, 2005. https://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/617.html.

2. “Humboldt Park Community Data Snapshot.” Chicago Community Area Series. Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, July 2023.

3. “Humboldt Park.” Accessed February 23, 2024. https://www.architecture.org/learn/resources/buildings-of-chicago/building/humboldt-park/.

4. Chicago Studies. “The History of Humboldt Park.” University of Chicago. https://chicagostudies.uchicago.edu/humboldt-park/humboldt-park-history-humboldt-park.

5. Pérez, Gina M.  “Puerto Ricans.” In Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago: Chicago History Museum and the Newberry Library, 2005. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1027.html.

6. Chicago Studies. “The History of Humboldt Park.”

7. Grossman, Ron. Chicago Tribune. “The Young Lords: How a Street Gang Turned to Community Activism,” July 8, 2018. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2018/07/08/the-young-lords-how-a-street-gang-turned-to-community-activism/.

8. Bloom, Mina. “Humboldt Park’s Puerto Rican Flags Are Officially Chicago Landmarks.” Block Club Chicago, July 21, 2022. http://blockclubchicago.org/2022/07/21/humboldt-parks-puerto-rican-flags-are-officially-chicago-landmarks/

9. Roberts, Emma González. “Understanding Paseo Boricua : Why the Preservation of Chicago’s Puerto Rican Enclave Matters.” Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2021. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/132733.

10. Mumm, Jesse Stewart. "When the White People Come: Gentrification and Race in Puerto Rican Chicago." Ph.D. Dissertation, Northwestern University, 2014. https://proxy.cc.uic.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/when-white-people-come-gentrification-race-puerto/docview/1559092117/se-2.

11. Mumm, "When the White People Come”

12. Roberts, Emma González. “Understanding Paseo Boricua”

13. The Commission on Chicago Landmarks, “Landmark Designation Report: Paseo Boricua Gateway Flags,” May 2022.

14. Image: Ins and outs of Humboldt Park, CITY 2000, University of Illinois at Chicago, Special Collections Department

15. Image: Puerto Rican Cultural Center Collection, University of Illinois Chicago

16. Image: Personal photograph, Restaurant with flags waving, photographed January 2024.

Bibliography

Badillo, David A. “Humboldt Park.” In Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago: Chicago History Museum and the Newberry Library, 2005. https://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/617.html.

Bloom, Mina. “Humboldt Park’s Puerto Rican Flags Are Officially Chicago Landmarks.” Block Club Chicago, July 21, 2022. http://blockclubchicago.org/2022/07/21/humboldt-parks-puerto-rican-flags-are-officially-chicago-landmarks/

Chicago Studies. “The History of Humboldt Park.” University of Chicago. https://chicagostudies.uchicago.edu/humboldt-park/humboldt-park-history-humboldt-park.

Commission on Chicago Landmarks. “Landmark Designation Report: Paseo Boricua Gateway Flags,” May 2022.

Grossman, Ron. Chicago Tribune. “The Young Lords: How a Street Gang Turned to Community Activism,” July 8, 2018. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2018/07/08/the-young-lords-how-a-street-gang-turned-to-community-activism/.

“Humboldt Park.” Accessed February 23, 2024. https://www.architecture.org/learn/resources/buildings-of-chicago/building/humboldt-park/.

“Humboldt Park Community Data Snapshot.” Chicago Community Area Series. Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, July 2023.

Mumm, Jesse Stewart. "When the White People Come: Gentrification and Race in Puerto Rican Chicago." Thesis, Northwestern University, 2014. https://proxy.cc.uic.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/when-white-people-come-gentrification-race-puerto/docview/1559092117/se-2.

Pérez, Gina M.  “Puerto Ricans.” In Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago: Chicago History Museum and the Newberry Library, 2005. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1027.html.

Roberts, Emma González. “Understanding Paseo Boricua : Why the Preservation of Chicago’s Puerto Rican Enclave Matters.” Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2021. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/132733.