Tequila Blanco: a rugged all-caps hand-drawn font for rustic branding

Design style

Tequila Blanco is an all-caps display face built around a single idea: worn, hand-drawn marks that look like they were cut into wood or scratched onto a leather label. The strokes are uneven by design, with edges that break and wobble rather than sit clean. Nicky Laatz has leaned into the imperfection rather than smoothing it out, and small curved spurs appear on several letters, giving the set a bit of frontier flourish without tipping into full ornament.

It reads as western more than generically rustic — think saloon signage, tooled leather, sun-bleached timber. That’s a specific mood, and the font commits to it fully. There’s no attempt to be neutral or quiet here. Every letterform has texture, and the roughness is consistent enough that it doesn’t feel randomly generated — it feels drawn by one hand with one tool.

Character set and features

The family ships as sixteen individual weights rather than a single variable file: a Regular, a Light, a Smooth (the same shapes with the rough edges softened down), and a Squat (a shorter, wider build), each with oblique versions, plus a separate Short set that compresses the cap height. That’s a lot of cuts for what is essentially one drawing style, and it gives you real room to move — the Smooth cuts are noticeably calmer and could carry more text than the rougher Regular, while Squat and Short are built for tight lockups where a tall condensed cap would fight the layout.

Because it’s all-caps only, there’s no lowercase to worry about pairing or spacing against — what you see in the caps is the whole alphabet. Language support covers Danish, English, French, German, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Swiss German, so accented characters across those sets are accounted for. Don’t expect a full multilingual glyph set beyond that, and don’t expect numerals or punctuation to carry the same hand-cut flourish as the letters — check those in isolation before committing to a lockup that leans on them.

Use cases

This is a font for short bursts of text, not paragraphs: logotypes, badge marks, product labels, signage, and the odd punchy headline on a poster or menu. The Squat and Short weights suit circular badge layouts and packaging labels where horizontal space is tight. The Light and Smooth versions are the ones to reach for if you need the roughness dialled back for a slightly more legible lockup, say on a bottle label where the brand name still has to read at a glance from a shelf.

It won’t work as a body-copy or long-form face — the texture that makes it interesting at large sizes turns to noise below a certain point, and the irregular strokes make sustained reading tiring fast. Pair it with a plain, quiet sans or serif for supporting text and let Tequila Blanco do the shouting at the top of the layout. Anyone building a coastal, desert, or countryside-adjacent brand identity will get the most out of it; anyone needing a neutral workhorse display face should look elsewhere.

What we liked, and what we didn’t

Strengths

• Sixteen weight variants give real flexibility from rough to smoothed, tall to squat
• The hand-cut spurs and worn edges give it a distinct, committed point of view
• Squat and Short cuts solve real layout problems for badges and tight lockups

Trade-offs

• All-caps only and texture-heavy, so it can't do body copy or long headlines
• The rustic western mood is narrow — it won't suit brands outside that register

Tequila Blanco commits fully to a rugged western mood and delivers a genuinely useful spread of weights to work with. It's a specialist tool for branding and labels, not a general-purpose display face, and its roughness limits where it can go.