Arsenica is a serif typeface designed by Francesco Canovaro for Zetafonts, and developed by a design team including Mario De Libero, Andrea Tartarelli and Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini. [...] Arsenica is a serif typeface designed by Francesco Canovaro for Zetafonts, and developed by a design team including Mario De Libero, Andrea Tartarelli and Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini. The design of Arsenica takes its inspiration from italian poster design at the beginning of the century, a time where typography, lettering and illustration where closely interwoven. Dawning nationalist movements, rather than using the modernist language, pushed on traditional Old Style letterforms often imbued with Art Nouveau and Deco sensibility. Artists like Giorgio Muggiani not only illustrated posters for Cinzano, Pirelli and Rinascente, but also provided logo design for newspapers, like "Il Popolo d'Italia". Starting from this mix of eclectic influences, Canovaro first developed the Arsenica Antiqua family, designed as display typeface that keeps the original Old Style low-contrast, wide proportions and quirky stylistic inventions. These where then distilled in a high contrast, Arsenica Display family, expanding the weight range to include both poster, ultrabold weights and lighter weights that give the design a distinct calligraphic flavour. Bringing the letterforms into contemporary taste meant also developing alternate letterforms that were included in the Arsenica Alternate family, that drops the art nouveau details in favour of a more controlled modern serif aestethic. Finally, Arsenica Text was developed by expanding the design space in the optical size axis, creating a low contrast, strongly readable old style typeface family, with a reduced weight set, oriented for long body copy typesetting. The final result is a superfamily of 41 weights, covering the design space with an expanded charset of over nine hundred glyphs, with full coverage of over two hundred languages using latin and cyrillic alphabets. All the weights of Arsenica come with a full set of open type features allowing to explore its vintage-inspired visual inventions thanks to stylistic sets, discretionary ligatures, contestual alternates and positional numbers. Two variable typefaces are included in the full family, allowing you to explore the design space and precisely control not only the weight but also the optical size design variations.

Blacker Sans Pro is a complete redesign and developement of the original family designed by Francesco Canovaro in 2019 as a sans-serif variant of the succesfull Blacker created by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli. The original idea of Blacker Sans was to create a versatile pairing for Blacker, parting with its spiky wedge serifs but keeping its dark, elegant character and extending its weight range to 20 weights including [...] Blacker Sans Pro is a complete redesign and developement of the original family designed by Francesco Canovaro in 2019 as a sans-serif variant of the succesfull Blacker created by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli. The original idea of Blacker Sans was to create a versatile pairing for Blacker, parting with its spiky wedge serifs but keeping its dark, elegant character and extending its weight range to 20 weights including italics. This Blacker Sans Pro family did also differ in contrast from the original Blacker family, choosing a more even and monolinear, almost grotesque approach. This choice that favored versatility over elegance left some of the original uses of Blacker not covered by its sans counterpart, and so two subfamilies were added, applying to the same skeleton varying degrees of contrast, from the readability-optimized medium contrast of Blacker Sans Text to the extreme variations of Blacker Sans Display, with its elegant juxtapositions of thin curves and thick black slabs. The original signature details of Blacker, like the hook shape of lowercase "f", have been complemented by new alternate forms, ligatures and swashes, with stylistic sets providing options to easily make logos and headings stand out. The wide range of OpenType features (that includes also small caps, positional numbers, and alternate punctuation) is applied to all the 60 weights of the family, each with over 1600 characters offering language support for 220+ languages using Latin, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets. Ready to make your text look gorgeous? Ditch your usual sans-serifs and try Blacker Sans Pro!        

Bogart has been designed in 2020 by Francesco Canovaro as a personal homage to the iconic look of low-contrast oldstyle fat faces, like Cooper Black (Oswald Bruce Cooper, 1922) and Goudy Heavy Face (Frederic W. Goudy and Sol Hess, 1925-1932). Originating from the modern old style of Bookman, these muddy, goopy shapes found their pop culture iconic status thanks to rub-on transfers and phototypesetting systems in the 1960s and 1970s. Positively [...] Bogart has been designed in 2020 by Francesco Canovaro as a personal homage to the iconic look of low-contrast oldstyle fat faces, like Cooper Black (Oswald Bruce Cooper, 1922) and Goudy Heavy Face (Frederic W. Goudy and Sol Hess, 1925-1932). Originating from the modern old style of Bookman, these muddy, goopy shapes found their pop culture iconic status thanks to rub-on transfers and phototypesetting systems in the 1960s and 1970s. Positively bursting with hippie energy and exuberant vitality, they often included an extensive repertoire of swash characters, bridging the space between lettering and typography. In researching these shapes, Canovaro decided to include also the influence of another idiosyncratic american old style typeface, Windsor, quoting its sloping shapes and quirky solutions, and expanding the weight range of Bogart to include a selection of display light weights where the muddy shapes of the heavy weights distill into elegant teardrop terminals. All the nine weights of Bogart, as well the matching true italics forms, feature an extended charset of over 1600 glyphs, covering 219 languages using latin, cyrillic and greek alphabets, and sporting a complete set of Open type features including alternate forms, discretionary ligatures, small capitals, stylistic sets, positional numbers, case-sensitive, terminal and initial swash forms. To add flexibility for editorial usage, a text-oriented Bogart Alternate set of nine weights was added to the family keeping the design more similar to its modern old style model and allowing for a heavy readable mid-weight range. Hollywood icon Humprey Bogart, famously said: "things are never so bad they can't be made worse.". This typeface was named after him, aiming at a way to embody the moody spirit of vintage typography, from film noir aesthetics, to the pop culture reference, from joyous swash titling and logo design to strict, balanced text typesetting. Because "typefaces are never so good that they can't be made better".

Inspired by a biography of Coco Chanel and trying to capture the quintessential mood of classical fashion elegance, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini designed Coco Gothic looking for the effect that the first geometric sans typefaces (from Caslon's first inventions to Futura, Berthold Grotesque or the italian Semplicità) had when printed on paper. [...] Inspired by a biography of Coco Chanel and trying to capture the quintessential mood of classical fashion elegance, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini designed Coco Gothic looking for the effect that the first geometric sans typefaces (from Caslon's first inventions to Futura, Berthold Grotesque or the italian Semplicità) had when printed on paper. The crisp modernist shapes acquired in printing charme and warmth due to ink spread and imperfection - something that has been translated digitally in a slight rounding of the corners in the glyphs of Coco Gothic. This signature touch is enhanced by the inclusion of light humanist touches to the proportions of the letters, resulting in the unique mix that makes Coco Gothic both contemporary and vintage looking. After six years from the original project (that has spawned in the meanwhile successful families like Cocogoose and Coco Sharp), we went back to the design to completely redraw and expand the original family, creating with a Pro version that has better on-screen readability, a wider weight range, variable type versions and more language coverage (with Coco Gothic Arabic adding a new script to the latin, greek and cyrillic of the original). Coco Gothic Pro comes in three subfamilies, each with seven weights with matching italics and featuring an extended character set with open type support for small caps, ligatures, alternates, European languages, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. The original, body-text optimised Coco Gothic and Coco Gothic Alternate subfamilies have been complemented whit a new Coco Gothic Display subfamily aimed at display usage, featuring tighter spacing and optimised letterforms. A distinguishing feature of Coco Gothic Pro is the inclusion of ten alternate historical sets that allow select period letterforms that range from art deco and nouveau, to modernism and to eighties’ minimalism. Equipped with such an array of historical variants, Coco Gothic Pro becomes an encyclopedia of styles from the last century, ready to transform itself and adapt to the mood of your text. To complement the family, a full range of variable font versions is provided to the buyers of the full family, including the special Coco Gothic Tardis variable typeface, allowing access to historical versions through variable sliders as in a typographic time machine. Please notice: All advanced features (small caps, alternate sets & ligatures) are developed using open type technology, fully compatible with Adobe software and major design softwares and OS, but not supported by every software. Historical variants included only for uppercase letters, and avalaible in Indesign / Photoshop through stylistic sets and in illustrator through Glyph Window. Download trial version and check your configuration before buying.

Designed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli with Maria Chiara Fantini, Lovelace is Zetafonts homage to the tradition of nineteenth century “Old Style” typography - a revival of Renaissance hand-lettered shapes driven by the desire to create a less formal and more friendly alternative to Bodonian serifs. While taking inspiration from the letter shapes created by Pheimester or Alexander Kay - with their calligraphic curves and [...] Designed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli with Maria Chiara Fantini, Lovelace is Zetafonts homage to the tradition of nineteenth century “Old Style” typography - a revival of Renaissance hand-lettered shapes driven by the desire to create a less formal and more friendly alternative to Bodonian serifs. While taking inspiration from the letter shapes created by Pheimester or Alexander Kay - with their calligraphic curves and heavy angled serifs that influenced Benguiat and Goudy’s typefaces in the 70s - we also tried to add elegance and contrast by following another 19th century revival style: the Elzevir. This digital homage to victorian typography, aptly named after the algorist daughter of lord Byron, is developed in two optical sizes, both in a six weights range from extralight to extrabold. The text variant offers maximum readability thanks to the generous x-height and screen-friendly design, while the display variant excels in the sharp contrast and thin details needed for editorial and large-size titling use. The italics, strongly influenced by calligraphy, have been complemented with a display script family, including luscious swashes and connected lowercase letters, lovingly designed by Zetafont in-house calligrapher. All the thirty weights of Lovelace cover over 200 languages that use latin, cyrillic and greek alphabets, and include advanced Open Type features as Stylistic Alternates, Standard and Discretionary Ligatures, Positional Numerals, Small Caps and Case Sensitive Forms.

. The designer wanted to find a way to bridge the classical letterforms of Roman Old Style typefaces with the readability of contemporary sans typefaces. This was achieved by using the so-called flared serif that emerges gradually from the stem of the letter, ending in a sharp angle. It's something that also reminds of the peculiar shapes of the Simoncini Method, invented by italian type designer Francesco Simoncini to get a sharper definition of letterforms. To this blend of classical elegance and modernist expertise, Malik adds the calligraphic influence of modern masters like Frederic Goudy or Ed Benguiat, visible in signature details like the reverse contrast uppercase B, or the calligraphic lowercase k.

Cairoli was originally cast by Italian foundry Nebiolo in 1928, as a license of a design by Wagner & Schmidt, known as Neue moderne Grotesk. Its solid grotesque design (later developed as Aurora by Weber and Akzidenz-Grotesk by Haas) was extremely successful: it anticipated the versatility of sans serif superfamilies thanks to its range of weights and widths, while still retaining some eccentricities from end-of the century lead and wood [...] Cairoli was originally cast by Italian foundry Nebiolo in 1928, as a license of a design by Wagner & Schmidt, known as Neue moderne Grotesk. Its solid grotesque design (later developed as Aurora by Weber and Akzidenz-Grotesk by Haas) was extremely successful: it anticipated the versatility of sans serif superfamilies thanks to its range of weights and widths, while still retaining some eccentricities from end-of the century lead and wood type.  In 2020 the Italiantype team directed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Mario De Libero decided to produce a revival of Cairoli, extending the original weight and width range and developing both a faithful Classic version and a Now variant. The Cairoli Classic family keeps the original low x-height range, very display-oriented, and normalizes the design while emphasizing the original peculiarities like the hook cuts in curved letters, the high-waisted uppercase R and the squared ovals of the letterforms. Cairoli Now is developed with an higher x-height, more suited for text and digital use, and adds to the original design deeper inktraps and round punctuation, while slightly correcting the curves for a more contemporary look. Born as an exercise in subtlety and love for lost letterforms, Cairoli Now stands, like its lead ancestor from a century ago, at the crossroads between artsy craftsmanship and industrial needs. Its deviations from the norm are small enough to give it personality without affecting readability, and the expanded weight and width range make it into a workhorse superfamily with open type features (alternates, stylistic sets, positional numbers) and coverage of over two hundred languages using the latin extended alphabet. 

The goal of the project was to use as inspiration Alberto's colourful, vintage themed digital illustration style to develop a suite of closely related typefaces that, used together, would allow designers to replicate the nostalgic charme of Italian poster and product design from the thirties and the forties. Two color overprints, coarse dithering, handmade calligraphy, reminiscences of art deco, hints of modernism and pop culture references: all this and more mixed in a exuberant and playful collection, created with illustrators, poster artists and book cover designers in mind.  

The design of new typefaces often involves a delicate dance between honoring tradition and embracing modernity. Mario De Libero's Claus stands as a testament to this artistic interplay, as it emerges as a reinvention of the classic Stunt Roman, a hand-lettering alphabet masterfully crafted by the penmanship virtuoso Ross Frederick George. First gracing the pages of the Speedball Text Book in 1929, this hand-lettered serif alphabet blended [...] The design of new typefaces often involves a delicate dance between honoring tradition and embracing modernity. Mario De Libero's Claus stands as a testament to this artistic interplay, as it emerges as a reinvention of the classic Stunt Roman, a hand-lettering alphabet masterfully crafted by the penmanship virtuoso Ross Frederick George. First gracing the pages of the Speedball Text Book in 1929, this hand-lettered serif alphabet blended the classical beauty of Old Style letterforms with the narrow proportions and fluid elegance of Art Deco. Inspired by its iconic proportions, Mario De Libero embarked on the design journey that birthed Claus. With a keen eye for harmonizing classic charm with a brutalist twist, De Libero introduced etched serifs and calligraphic quirks, subtly adapting the letterforms to a more contemporary, digital taste. The result is a festive typeface that effortlessly transitions between traditional and modern design landscapes. Claus comes with a full range of OpenType features, boasting quirky ligatures, design alternates, and a Small Caps version. This versatility ensures seamless integration into diverse projects, from editorial layouts to luxury branding. The contrasted texture of Claus invites designers to explore the timeless beauty of deco hand-lettering translated in a contemporary context, promising a harmonious blend of sophistication and functionality. 

Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini’s Coco Gothic has just been updated to an awesome new Pro version (out now on MyFonts) and we thought that its wide array of historical alternates could be made more visible... Coco Tardis, the first time traveling typeface, was born! [...] Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini’s Coco Gothic has just been updated to an awesome new Pro version (out now on MyFonts) and we thought that its wide array of historical alternates could be made more visible... Coco Tardis, the first time traveling typeface, was born! It’s easier to use than Doctor Who’s blue phonebox or a De Lorean: just select the date with a handy variable font slider, and Coco Tardis will magically take on a period-relevant appearance.

Created as a display typeface in 2012 by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Cocogoose is one of Zetafonts most loved typefaces. A sans serif typeface of geometric proportions, with very low contrast and slightly rounded corners, it was the first typeface to be produced in the Coco series, an ongoing research on the design variation in gothic typefaces through the ages. Cocogoose extreme x-height and ultrabold weight (with regular being comparable to [...] Created as a display typeface in 2012 by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Cocogoose is one of Zetafonts most loved typefaces. A sans serif typeface of geometric proportions, with very low contrast and slightly rounded corners, it was the first typeface to be produced in the Coco series, an ongoing research on the design variation in gothic typefaces through the ages. Cocogoose extreme x-height and ultrabold weight (with regular being comparable to heavy weights of other typefaces), have since then made it very popular for effective display and logo use, also thanks to decorative versions like Cocogoose Letterpress. Since 2016, Andrea Tartarelli has been improving the typeface expanding the original glyph set to include cyrillic and greek and adding extra weights, widths, and italics to the original family range, and bringing Cocogoose to an impressive count of 52 variants.In 2019, Francesco Canovaro has teamed with Andrea Tartarelli and Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini to create a new variant subfamily: Cocogoose Classic, featuring 8 weights and matching italics. Cocogoose Classic keeps the original design for uppercase characters while developing a new design for lowercase, with a smaller x-height, round dots and expanded open-type features, including positional numerals, alternate forms, and extended ligatures and bringing the glyph count to over 1000 characters. 

Cocomat has been designed by Francesco Canovaro and Debora Manetti as a development of the Coco Gothic typeface system created by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini. It shares with all the other subfamilies in the Coco Gothic system a geometric skeleton with open, more humanistic proportions, a sans serif design with slightly rounded corners and low contrast proportions, without optical compensation on the horizontal lines, resulting in a quasi-inverted [...] Cocomat has been designed by Francesco Canovaro and Debora Manetti as a development of the Coco Gothic typeface system created by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini. It shares with all the other subfamilies in the Coco Gothic system a geometric skeleton with open, more humanistic proportions, a sans serif design with slightly rounded corners and low contrast proportions, without optical compensation on the horizontal lines, resulting in a quasi-inverted contrast look in the boldest weights. What differentiates Cocomat from the other subfamilies in Coco Gothic are some slight design touches in the uppercase letters, with a vertical unbalancing reminiscent of art deco design, notably evident in uppercase "E", "A","F","P" and "R" - while lowercase letters have been given some optical compensation on the stems, like in "n","m", "p" and "q". These design choices, evoking the second and third decade of the last century (Cocomat is also referred as Coco 1920 in the Coco Gothic Family) all give Cocomat a slight vintage feeling, making it a perfect choice every time you need to add a period vibe or an historical flair to your design, like in food or luxury branding.    The typeface, first published in 2014, has been completely redesigned by the original authors in 2019 as Cocomat PRO to include eight extra weights (thin, medium, black and heavy in both roman and italic form), extra open type features (including alternate forms, positional numerals), and extra glyphs making Cocomat cover over two hundred languages using latin, cyrillic and greek alphabets.

COCOSIGNUM takes inspiration from the typography of the italian thirties. [...] COCOSIGNUM takes inspiration from the typography of the italian thirties. The imperial uppercase with its propaganda deco overtones is softened by a cursive lowercase geometric script in the Corsivo Italico version. It comes in two styles and five weights, covering over forty languages using latin alphabet, as well as greek and cyrillic.

Cocotte is a small caps sans serif display typeface inspired by the graphic style of early art nouveau. It comes in three weights with matching italics and features a regular style, inspired by arts&crafts and geometric jugendstil, and an alternate style more reminescent of french and italian art nouveau. [...] Cocotte is a small caps sans serif display typeface inspired by the graphic style of early art nouveau. It comes in three weights with matching italics and features a regular style, inspired by arts&crafts and geometric jugendstil, and an alternate style more reminescent of french and italian art nouveau. Cocotte and Cocotte Alternates are the 1900 and 1910 versions of the Coco Gothic typeface family, a contemporary geometric sans serif typeface with slightly rounded corners featuring historical versions for each decade of the last century: an encyclopedia of styles ready to transform itself and adapt to the mood of your text. Cocotte features an extended character set with support for over forty European languages and Greek and Cyrillic alphabets.

Saul Bass iconic hand lettering for Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm film title sequence, as well as his innovative treatment of motion graphics still look fresh today, more than sixty years after they hit the screen. There's no way for a true lettering aficionado to avoid falling in love with Bass vibrating, almost brutal cut-out aestethics. As an humble homage to Bass inspiration and sensibility, and inspired also by [...] Saul Bass iconic hand lettering for Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm film title sequence, as well as his innovative treatment of motion graphics still look fresh today, more than sixty years after they hit the screen. There's no way for a true lettering aficionado to avoid falling in love with Bass vibrating, almost brutal cut-out aestethics. As an humble homage to Bass inspiration and sensibility, and inspired also by cartoon modern lettering and jazzy graphics of the fifties, we decidede to work on a typeface that could show interlocking rythm and variation in design without resorting to thousands of ligature special letters, but rather by virtue of its modular structure. The result is DoubleBass, a jazzy four-weights display family that provides an out-of-the-box tool for cartoon modern style logo and heading design. The alternating sets of capital letters and numbers make soure that a bouncy rythm is kept - by virtue of open type ligature substitution - while you type away.Lighter weights can work for small blocks of text, while the regular and heavy weights show their best in big sizes and display uses. Foreign languages using latin alphabet are covered, as well as russian cyrillic. Any time you need that jazzy retro vibe, just put on your turntable some cool bebop record and start designing!

Etrusco Now is the revival of a lead typeface originally cast in lead by Italian foundry Nebiolo in the early 1920s. Heavily inspired by the design of the Medium weight of Schelter & Giesecke's Grotesk, Etrusco was, like Cairoli, an early precursor of the modernist grotesque superfamilies: a solid, multi-purpose "work-horse" typeface family that could solve a wide range of design problems with its range of widths and weights.  [...] Etrusco Now is the revival of a lead typeface originally cast in lead by Italian foundry Nebiolo in the early 1920s. Heavily inspired by the design of the Medium weight of Schelter & Giesecke's Grotesk, Etrusco was, like Cairoli, an early precursor of the modernist grotesque superfamilies: a solid, multi-purpose "work-horse" typeface family that could solve a wide range of design problems with its range of widths and weights.  When designing the new incarnation of Nebiolo's Etrusco, the Italiantype team directed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Mario de Libero decided to extend the original weight and width range to keep this "superfamily" approach. Etrusco Now has twenty-one styles widths in three widths of seven weights each, with matching italics; the original weights for the typeface have been collected in the Etrusco Classic subfamily. Etrusco Now new widths allowed the team to include in the design many nods and homages to other vintage classics of Nebiolo. The lighter weights of the normal width have been heavily influenced by the modernist look of Recta, while the heavy condensed and compressed widths refer to the black vertical texture of Aldo Novarese's Metropol. This infuses the typeface with a slightly vintage mood, making Etrusco at the same time warmly familiar and unexpected to eyes accustomed to the formal and cold look of late modernist grotesques like Helvetica.  Contemporary but rich in slight historical quirks, Etrusco Now is perfect for any editorial and branding project that aims to be different in a subtle way. Etrusco Now's deviations from the norm are small enough to give it personality without affecting readability, while its wide range of open type features (alternates, stylistic sets, positional numbers) and language coverage make it a problem solver for any situation. Like its cousin Cairoli, Etrusco is born out of love for lost letterforms and stands like its lead ancestor from a century ago, at the crossroads between artsy craftsmanship and industrial needs.    

Freehand is a type system designed by Debora Manetti and Francesco Canovaro to emulate the natural appearance of handmade brush writing. Open type ligature substitutions are used to randomly alternate between different versions of each character to give the final output a realistic, uneven look. [...] Freehand is a type system designed by Debora Manetti and Francesco Canovaro to emulate the natural appearance of handmade brush writing. Open type ligature substitutions are used to randomly alternate between different versions of each character to give the final output a realistic, uneven look. The main typeface of the system is a wide freestyle brush cursive, featuring over four hundreds of alternate version for characters and double letter ligatures. A "brush easy" version is included without the substitutions if you need more consistent look in your design and better control over letter variation through the glyph panel. The two freehand brush weights are complemented by two sets of icons of matching style, one for ui design with navigation icons and one with food icons. The system also includes a blockletter family in two weights, to be used together with the other fonts to create variation and contrast in your design. Freehand covers over 40 languages that use the Latin alphabet, with a full range of accents and diacritics.

Probably as a reaction to the pragmatism of modernist design, the seventies saw an explosion of buoyant, vivacious typography. Psychedelia fueled a return to the melting, lush shapes of Art Nouveau while Pop culture embraced the usage of funky, joyful lettering for advertising, product design and tv titling. New low-cost technologies like photo-lettering and rub-on transfer required new fonts to be expressive rather than legible, pushing [...] Probably as a reaction to the pragmatism of modernist design, the seventies saw an explosion of buoyant, vivacious typography. Psychedelia fueled a return to the melting, lush shapes of Art Nouveau while Pop culture embraced the usage of funky, joyful lettering for advertising, product design and tv titling. New low-cost technologies like photo-lettering and rub-on transfer required new fonts to be expressive rather than legible, pushing designers to produce, bubbly, high-spirited masterpieces, where geometric excess and calligraphic inventions melted joyfully. Freitag is Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini's homage to this era and its typography. His starting point was the design of a heavy sans serif with humanist condensed proportions, flared stems and reverse contrast, that generated both the main family, and a variant display subfamily. The main typeface family slowly builds the tension and design exuberance along the weight axis - a bit like our desire for the weekend increases during the week. In Light and Medium weights the font shows a more controlled, medium-contrast design, tightly spaced for maximum display effect. The Book weight follows the same design but uses a more relaxed letter spacing to allow usage in smaller sizes and short body copy. As weight increases in the Bold weight the style becomes more expressive, with a visible reverse contrast building up and culminating in the Heavy weight with his clearly visible "bell bottoms" feel. In the display sub-family the design is pushed further by introducing variant letterforms that have a stronger connection to calligraphy and lettering. Also, the weight range becomes a optical one, with weights marked as Medium, Large, XLarge, as bringing the contrast and the boldness to the extreme creates smaller counterspaces that require bigger usage sizes. Another important addition of the display subfamiily is the connected italics that sport swash capitals and cursive letterforms, developed with logo design and ultra-expressive editorial design in mind. To balance the extreme contrast in the XL weight, contrast of punctuation is reduced, creating a rich, highly-dinamyc texture wherever diacritics and marks are used in the text. The full family includes 16 styles + 4 variable fonts, allowing full control of the design over its tree-hugging design space. All 20 fonts share an extended latin charset with open type features including case sensitive forms, single and double story variants and alternate glyphs.  According to its creator, "Freitag is the typeface that sounds like an imaginary Woodstock where on the stage with Jimi Hendrix with Novarese, Motter, Excoffon and Benguiat playing onstage with Jimi Hendrix". Jeepers creepers!

Andrea Tartarelli discovered the letterforms that would inspire his Gronau family in a 1912 specimen by the Berlin-based Wilhelm Gronaus Schriftgießerei, that showcased the typeface Fette Reichs-Deutsch, designed by Wilhelm Gronau in 1902. Even if Gronau also cerated Art Nouveau inspired typefaces like Berolina or idiosyncratic Sütterlin “blackletter cursives” like Hohenzollern Schrift, his work mostly centres on gothic letter shapes. [...] Andrea Tartarelli discovered the letterforms that would inspire his Gronau family in a 1912 specimen by the Berlin-based Wilhelm Gronaus Schriftgießerei, that showcased the typeface Fette Reichs-Deutsch, designed by Wilhelm Gronau in 1902. Even if Gronau also cerated Art Nouveau inspired typefaces like Berolina or idiosyncratic Sütterlin “blackletter cursives” like Hohenzollern Schrift, his work mostly centres on gothic letter shapes. Fette Reichs Deutsch, that Tartarelli digitised as Gronau Fette, sports a very broad and square structure, mild contrast and a very geometric treatment of shapes, with slightly rounded terminals, straight lines and clear 45 degree angles. This unusual, pre-modernist approach to letterform inspired Tartarelli to explore its potential for display use, with the creation of an inline version that modernises the original and pushes to the maximum its dynamic energy. Gronau inline design transforms the broad nib marks into a ribbon folding in 3d to recreate the original letterforms, adding a dynamic, sporty language to the original typeface gothic feel. With Gronau Neue, Tartarelli tried to find a contemporary, gestural interpretation of blackletter shapes, adding a slightly calligraphic look and feel to to the original hasty lines and energetic construction. This third variant of Gronau is the one that most departs from the original mode: using generous x-height and condensed proportions, it achieves a more contemporary feel and extends the family expressive range into display, editorial and packaging options. All the versions of Gronau sport a wide range of Open type features and glyph alternates, further enriching the usage possibility of this typeface that embodies our contemporary swap culture by embracing the many subtleties and historical interpretations of blackletter typography while at the same time playfully expressing with a digital, dynamic spirit.

Stadio Now is the revival of a original design by Aldo Novarese for dry transfer brand R41, published in 1974. The original typeface, is an extra bold grotesque sans serif that is notable for its reverse contrast, with the horizontal lines being thicker than the vertical. This style, historically called “Italian”, result in a dramatic effect, in which the letters look slightly odd. In his never-ending quest for interesting letterforms, [...] Stadio Now is the revival of a original design by Aldo Novarese for dry transfer brand R41, published in 1974. The original typeface, is an extra bold grotesque sans serif that is notable for its reverse contrast, with the horizontal lines being thicker than the vertical. This style, historically called “Italian”, result in a dramatic effect, in which the letters look slightly odd. In his never-ending quest for interesting letterforms, Novarese was intrigued by this style and created some successful and interesting variations on the idea, from the calligraphic slab Estro to the sci-fi Sintex. In his book Il Segno Alfabetico Novarese described Stadio as a “decorative display typeface, in the so-called nineteenth century ‘Italian’ style, but sans serif. Horizontal proportions have been visibly enlarged, offering a very intriguing graphic effect”. Published in 2021 with a prerelease version offered in occasion of Novarese’s 100th birth anniversary, Stadio Now expands the original design into a multi-weight versatile family, with text and display variants and a variable version to fully explore its reverse contrast design space. In autumn 2021 the family was expanded with the inclusion of Stadio Deva, a devanagari version of the typeface in five weights, available exclusively on Canva.com.

Mario De Libero designed Swanstone while investigating XIX Century Old Style typefaces. Designs like Theophile Beaudoire’s Romana (1860) or Miller & Richard’s Modernized Old Style, that re-imagined the classical “Venetian” letterforms adding flared serifs and early Art Nouveau influences. In Italy, one of these fonts was Raffaello Bertieri’s Raffaello, which De Libero used as the starting point of his research in a contemporary [...] Mario De Libero designed Swanstone while investigating XIX Century Old Style typefaces. Designs like Theophile Beaudoire’s Romana (1860) or Miller & Richard’s Modernized Old Style, that re-imagined the classical “Venetian” letterforms adding flared serifs and early Art Nouveau influences. In Italy, one of these fonts was Raffaello Bertieri’s Raffaello, which De Libero used as the starting point of his research in a contemporary retelling of these exuberant and sexily unsettling letterforms. Developed as a single weight to be released in our Zetafonts Singularity line, Swanstone will be available for a limited time as a gift to all subscribers of Zetafonts Type Club. Don’t forget checking our next newsletters!  

Bulletto is a bold display script font. Made for logos and headlines, it features a slight slant, connecting letterforms and a big x-height. Opentype features include ligatures, swashes, alternate finals and a full set of uppercase alternates. The complete family features Bulletto Regular and his upright version Bulletto Straight with their light companions. Plus Bulletto Alto, an italic version with taller ascenders and descenders for a more [...] Bulletto is a bold display script font. Made for logos and headlines, it features a slight slant, connecting letterforms and a big x-height. Opentype features include ligatures, swashes, alternate finals and a full set of uppercase alternates. The complete family features Bulletto Regular and his upright version Bulletto Straight with their light companions. Plus Bulletto Alto, an italic version with taller ascenders and descenders for a more calligraphic look. Take care: All advanced features (swashes, alternate endings & ligatures) are developed using open type technology, fully compatible with Adobe software and major design softwares and OS, but not supported by every software. Check before buying! 

Francesco Canovaro was inspired for the design of Quenta by the discovery of the handlettered masthead of Queenslander, a weekly magazine of news related to "society, sport, literature, theater and rural life", published in Queensland, Australia, during the first half of XIX century. [...] Francesco Canovaro was inspired for the design of Quenta by the discovery of the handlettered masthead of Queenslander, a weekly magazine of news related to "society, sport, literature, theater and rural life", published in Queensland, Australia, during the first half of XIX century. The condensed serif letterforms of the magazine title, embellished by a highlight effect, had been complemented by a vibrant cursive script. It was an eye catching combination typical of the so called "showcard" lettering style, widely used in advertising during the first half of last century. Looking for the same vintage vibes, Francesco's research moved to the books by penmasters like Ross F. George or Samuel Weld. In their showcard manuals, he found a peculiar ambiguity in the letterform treatments, halfway between calligraphic execution and contour drawing. This warm, human touch and the historical references gave the condensed shapes of Quenta a lively personality and a literary charme. To match a design so rich in vintage storytelling, Francesco choose for the typeface a name that comes from the writings of one of the master world-builders of the last century. "Quenta" is the Elven word for "story" used by J.R.R. Tolkien in the Silmarillion. To let you experiment with his vintage decorative layers, Quenta comes in four styles and different color font formats. It also includes Discretionary ligatures to allow you to use script elements to enrich its expressive range for editorial and logo design.