Luis Siquot, who would be celebrated as Argentina’s “typo pioneer,” is among the 23 international students featured in the June 1973 exhibition Ausländische Studenten der HBK (international students of H(f)BK). The show had taken place upon the initiative of the academy’s then director Herbert von Buttlar who had recruited HFBK alumnus Gavin Jantjes in support. As Jantjes relates, the show had been conceived with a political agenda in mind: it responded both to students’ and teachers’ calls for a more diverse institution and to threats regarding the international students financial support. Jantjes, South African-born, teamed up with his Argentian-born fellow-student Luis Siquot when it came to realizing a show that was to highlight the international students’ achievements.1
The catalog to accompany the exhibition introduces Siquot as a wildly bearded man of many talents – born in Plaza Huincul (Argentina) in 1945, he is named both a (former) student and practitioner of architecture, film, graphic design, and philosophy. But what had taken him to Hamburg? In 1967, Siquot seems to have received a bursary from the German DAAD (the German Academic Exchange Service) to study at Ulm’s Hochschule für Gestaltung that had been founded in 1953 in the spirit of the Bauhaus.2
The institution, however, closed in 1968; Siquot, able to secure his grant, went to HFBK Hamburg instead where, between 1970 and 1975, he joined the graphic design class of Prof. Hans Michel.
According to the website myfonts.com, Siquot, a fan of typography, had been working on his first fonts since 1968. In 1991, he is said to have acquired his first Mac and to have ventured into digital design. Under the umbrella of International Typeface Corporation (ITC), he digitized his own vintage fonts such as Abaton, Arecibo or Juanita.3 All in all, Siquot published 12 fonts with ITC; an overview is also available via the online archive of Offenbach’s Klingspor Museum, a museum dedicated to bookmaking and typography in the 20th and 21st centuries.4 With its many different versions, Juanita must have been Siquot’s favorite in what appears to be mostly headline fonts, given the many details, roundness and somewhat decorative character of his letters. A 2002 poster in ITC Arecibo advertising “Radio Conga” as much as Siquot’s own letter foundry is a case in point.5
Klaus-Peter Staudinger, a German communication designer and explorer of the world of fonts, enthusiastically reports from a 2014 journey to Argentina and the region’s graphic design scene, referring to Siquot as the country’s “typo pioneer.”6 Both Staudinger and the website myfont.com mention Siquot’s activities as (private) teacher offering graphic design courses at Córdoba, Argentina, where he is said to live. Siquot, who in a recent image sports a mild and cleanly shaven face,7 seems to have retired. His website /www.siquotdesign.com turns out to be defunct.
A man of letters, Siquot nonetheless designed the odd record cover. In this capacity, he embellished the 1995 collaborative album The Rite of Strings by Al Di Meola, Stanley Clarke and Jean-Luc Ponty with what comes across as a vividly colored abstraction, fused with the hint of a violin’s strings, neck and pegbox and musical notation.8
Siquot’s name also features among those responsible for the look of the 2008 jazz release Simply Flute by Sam Most.9
I would like to thank my colleague Julian Mader, Guest Professor Graphics at HFBK Hamburg, for his very helpful crash course in typography. This article was published in February 2025.
