type blog

A true work of art – a poem, a statue, a melody – is a form that pre-exists in the possibilities of language, of marble, of musical notation. The artist discovers it like a theorem. Italo Calvino 1. Archive discoveries Our exploration of Aldo Novarese’s design space began in 2019, with a visit to Archivio Tipografico in Turin. Born as a love project from a bunch of graphic designers and typographers, Archivio Tipografico is a collaborative space for the preservation, study and practice of the typographic arts, set in a printing office that hosts…read more

2020 is not only the year of Covid. For typography lovers it also marks the 100th birth anniversary of Aldo Novarese, Italian master of type design. To celebrate it, Zetafonts is going to release the digital revival of Stadio, a forgotten reverse contrast masterpiece designed by Novarese in 1974 and published only as rub-on transfer. Our revival, Stadio Now, is a full family with nineteen variants that explore all the possibilities of the original design space. It is available for pre-release on Zetafonts website, with exclusive perks for supporters.

This new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid and the book Le jardin du Centaure of Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the most placid works with adventure. (Jorge Luis Borges) Specimen pages for Cairoli Tonda Neretta 1. The case of the old specimen It was at the October 2019 TypeThursday Florence meeting that we first discovered…read more

SPREAD SOME GOOD KARMA WITH FREE TYPE IN DARK TIMES LET’S MAKE YOUR DAYS SWEETER WITH SOME POSITIVE TYPE Trapped home during the Coronavirus outburst of March 2020 the Zetafonts team found some solace from the world-wide anxiety by designing letters for the #36daysoftype challenge. To fight dark thoughts and spread some good karma we decided to add a free font twist, selecting the best glyphs drawn to develop a collection of ten free typefaces for download: the Quarantype Collection! We did our best to make this little gift to…read more

Script logos and calligraphy-inspired fonts are a big trend today. But script typography is not easy to use. Legibility issues, long ascenders and descenders, problems with all-uppercase words. We saw some interesting typefaces trying to address at least the readability issue – like the ubiquous Lobster font – but we were still not satisfied. We wanted to create a script typeface that was a bit like a swiss knife for designers, with easy to use features and a good result in display use but also in typesetting for short texts. This…read more