Acid Grotesk is a typeface that’s stuck with me for reasons beyond the letterforms. It’s Folch Studio‘s custom typeface for Acid House Barcelona, and I have a real soft spot for Acid House’s home in Poblenou — one of my favourite areas to stay in the city, and a neighbourhood with its own unpolished, industrial character that the typeface somehow channels.

Folch designed Acid Grotesk in 2019 for Acid House Barcelona, the creative and education hub the studio opened in Poblenou in partnership with Vice Media and Elisava. Senior designer Josep Puy led the typeface, built to work as a single consistent voice across the whole project — website, signage, posters, business cards, even the neon sign above the door.

The brief could easily have leaned into acid house’s psychedelic visual language, but the team deliberately pulled back from that. Acid Grotesk stays a genuinely functional grotesk at its core: smooth curves, rounded vertices, a big x-height and compact lowercase caps. The personality comes through in the alternates instead — a snake-like open ‘s’, a ‘y’ with an inverted tail, and, best of all, a smiley face glyph as a direct nod to the genre the whole project takes its name from.

Acid Grotesk is available to license — desktop, web, app, broadcast and social — via Folch’s type site.

The building it lives in adds to why this one resonates. Acid House Barcelona is housed in a converted factory in Poblenou, reworked by local studio Arquitectura-G — white walls laid over preserved industrial textures, riveted beams and trusses left exposed, planned with a ten-year outlook rather than a typical short-term fit-out. It’s exactly the kind of considered, unpolished-but-intentional space that makes Poblenou one of my favourite parts of the city.

Further reading: It’s Nice That, AIGA Eye on Design, Creative Boom, and Designboom on the building itself.