Motivated by my love for the pixel, I designed Bitter—a contemporary slab serif typeface made for comfortable reading on any screen. Born from the precision of the pixel grid and guided by rational design principles, Bitter brings clarity, strength, and rhythm to digital typography.
It merges the generous x-height and legibility of the humanist tradition with subtle details that breathe life into text. With low contrast in stroke weight and a Regular style bolder than standard print counterparts, Bitter creates a rich typographic color. Square-terminal serifs, as thick as the main strokes, reinforce its strong and steady presence.
Each glyph is carefully drawn, starting in a pixel grid and refined with smooth, high-quality curves. The typeface is thoughtfully spaced by hand to minimize kerning pairs—an essential feature for reliable web performance, especially where browser support is limited.
The text you are reading is set in Bitter.
Designed by Sol Matas and published by Google Fonts, Bitter supports Latin, Cyrillic, and Devanagari scripts, making it a versatile choice for global design.
Dambleé Brasserie. The studio was commissioned to design the new branding for the brasserie.
Clásica Victoria, the prestigious patisserie in Buenos Aires approached the studio to improve the already existing logotype. After that we designed packagings, boards, stationery, postcards, patterns and promotional emails.
The Abhaya typeface project was funded by Google and led by Mooniak, a collaborative collective of designers based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The project was developed in cooperation with Mr. Pushpananda Ekanayake, the original designer of the FM Abhaya font, and Sol Matas, who designed the Latin script. Within Mooniak, Pathum Egodawatta and Ayantha Randika contributed through consulting, project management, and OpenType engineering.
The Latin set draws inspiration from the distinctive rhythm of the original Sinhala design, particularly its contrast between thick and thin strokes. These features were carefully adapted to align with the visual logic of Latin letterforms. Influenced by the ductus of Didone typefaces, certain terminals subtly echo Sinhala shapes, creating a culturally resonant and visually unique design.
Learn more about the Abhaya font here.
In February 2016, Alphabettes contributors opened their minds and hearts to create the Love Letters series.
«Sol Loves Antique Rubber Stamps»
You can see my original studio contribution here.
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This project resonated deeply with me, and I recently revisited it for the upcoming book Alphabettes Soup: 2015–2025, which celebrates ten years of feminist-based approaches to type research, design, and creative community-building. My new text will be published as part of that collection.
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Since I was a child, stamps have been a constant presence in my life. When I visited my parents at the bank where they worked, I was fascinated by the way they marked documents with date and signature stamps. That imprint of ink on paper turned the ephemeral into something permanent—a simple action that said, “This happened. This exists.”
When I started making my own sketchbooks and diaries in elementary school, stamps became more playful. I had stamps of Hello Kitty, My Melody, and Little Twin Stars. Some had short phrases that sounded cool at the time—stamps that left small declarations of identity on my notebooks, without me thinking too much about their meaning. Later, I discovered more technical stamps, the kind where you assembled words letter by letter with tweezers, like a puzzle.
As the years passed, my relationship with stamps changed. As an avid traveler, I began collecting letter stamps, passport stamps, train station stamps in Japan. They were proof of movement, records of transit, silent witnesses to places I had belonged to, even if only for a few hours. Moving to Berlin brought a complete 180-degree turn to my life, and I dedicated myself entirely to type design. That’s when my friend Eike gave me a collection of stamps with different typefaces. I had never seen anything so beautiful. Of all the varied styles, one in particular captivated me: italics. These always seemed special to me, with that slant that adds a more dynamic rhythm—a way to stand out without demanding attention, to differentiate with elegance.
Maybe that’s why, one day, I decided I had to stamp a love letter. A letter that, interestingly, was not my own, but Frida Kahlo’s to Diego Rivera. A love that, like ink, was chaotic, uneven, full of marks and smudges. In the letter, Frida wrote:
"I love you more than my own skin, and even though you don’t love me the same way, you love me anyway, don’t you? And if you don’t, I’ll always have the hope that you do, and that’s enough for me."
As I stamped each word, I felt the texture of the ink on my fingers, the familiar chemical scent that reminded me that love, like manual printing, is never exact. There’s always a margin of error. You can press too hard and end up with a smudge. You can apply too little pressure, and the mark won’t be legible. But it remains, regardless. Maybe that’s why I keep using stamps—because they remind me that some things need to be imprinted by hand, with the imperfection of a human touch, with the certainty that, even if the mark isn’t perfect, it remains. Persistent. Irreplaceable. Indelible.
Accademia della Pizza is a branch with many restaurants in Buenos Aires,
Exedra is a traditional Cafe at one of the most traditional corners of Buenos Aires. The client commissioned the studio to create the new branding for the re-openning of the place. We designed the menu, crockery, packagings, boards, sign making, promotional posters and stationery.
The Ayanna Narrow project—recently renamed Yadelvi—was led by the designers at Mooniak, a collaborative collective of creatives based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Sol Matas contributed the design of the Latin script. The initial development and release of the typeface were funded by Google Fonts.
The Latin set features a generous x-height with short ascenders and descenders, making it highly space-efficient. Its tone is somewhat neutral, yet it carries a hint of softness through smooth curves that introduce a subtle, whimsical charm.
Ayanna Narrow (Yadelvi) is well-suited for headlines, subheads, and short blocks of text such as pull quotes—anywhere you need impact without sacrificing clarity.
Parque Chas is a variable sans serif font with humanistic influences, designed for use in graphical user interfaces and information design. This superfamily is a highly versatile typographic system, ideal for digital and print media alike. With clarity, consistency, and precision, it stands out in corporate communications, signage, maps, and complex design systems.
Originally co-designed with Juan Pablo del Peral in 2009 and expanded in 2018, the family now includes a broader character set, multiple styles and weights, and four variable axes: weight, width, slant, and optical size.
Its design features slightly condensed proportions and generous spacing, giving the text room to breathe. Letterforms are clean and simple, with subtly lighter strokes than comparable humanist sans-serif families—optimized for legibility in small sizes and dense layouts. Parque Chas balances performance and readability, making it a reliable workhorse across a wide range of applications.
A standout feature of this variable font is its extreme slant axis. While most sans-serif italics tilt around 7 degrees, Parque Chas allows for up to 21 degrees of slant in both directions. This makes it particularly useful for rotated texts, signage, or urban maps with diagonal grids—like the neighborhood it’s named after.
Parque Chas is named after a unique district in Buenos Aires, whose circular and irregular street layout served as a testing ground for the typeface during its early development. The font was recognized with an award at Tipos Latinos 2010.
The family also includes a handful of practical symbols and arrows, ideal for wayfinding and interface design. Advanced OpenType features enhance its flexibility: small caps, ligatures, dynamic fractions, four sets of figures, superscripts and subscripts, ordinals, and language-specific alternates for Catalan, Guaraní, Dutch, Turkish, Romanian, and more.
London City is a traditional Cafe at one of the most famous corners of Buenos Aires. The client commissioned the studio to create the new branding for the re-openning of the place. We designed the menu, shopwindows, packagings, boards, sign making, promotional posters and stationery.
Own hotels is a branch of boutique hotels situated in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Montevideo (Uruguay).
Gemunu Libre is a versatile typeface family that comes in five weights, from ExtraLight to ExtraBold. Each font supports the complete Sinhala script and includes a Latin companion designed by Sol Matas to harmonize seamlessly with the Sinhala.
The Latin design reflects the modular, slightly condensed construction of the Sinhala, with letterforms based on a square structure softened by rounded corners and a large x-height—achieving a cohesive visual language across scripts.
The project was funded by Google Fonts and led by Mooniak, a collaborative collective of designers based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It began in cooperation with Mr. Pushpananda Ekanayake, the original designer of the FM Gemunu font, and evolved through an international collaboration that brought together technical and cultural expertise.
Gemunu Libre is designed for clarity and impact, making it an excellent choice for bilingual or multilingual design, editorial work, and user interfaces.
POP Hotel is the first Budget Boutique Hotel in Buenos Aires. Colorful and pop design.
Volta is of the most well-known ice cream shop chains in Buenos Aires.
The client commissioned the studio to design a new image for a new branch. They were looking for a cheerful new design for the shop with the already existing logotype. We designed the menu, leaflets, promotional material, general signs and toilets signs.
