type blog | Behind the typographic scenes

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Quarantype Collection

Posted by Veronica Iodice in New releases on Mar/2020

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

Zetafonts wins the Communication Arts Typography Competition 2020

Posted by Veronica Iodice in Awards, Promotion on Jan/2020

Monterchi type family was created for the rebranding of one of the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance, the Madonna del Parto fresco by Piero della Francesca. His hand-painted autograph inscriptions inspired the elegant letterforms and the quirky ligature forms included in the four variants of this 50-weights ode to the beauty of classical roman letterforms. Monterchi Type Family has been chosen as one of the winners of the 2020 Typography Competition by Communication Arts Magazine. One hundred and thirty-one projects were selected by a jury of creative professionals; 1,264 entries were submitted to the competition. With his elegant, historical aesthetic, Monterchi embodies the spirit of early Renaissance and the humanist obsession with geometric beauty, while providing designers with over a versatile extended glyph set covering over 200 languages using the Latin alphabet, as well as Greek and Russian Cyrillic. […]

Christmas Pack 2019

Posted by Veronica Iodice in Promotion on Dec/2019

Celebrating Christmas with an amazing Font Pack: 53 completely free fonts from Zetafonts’ type families published during 2019. This pack allows you to enjoy the full range of Zetafonts typefaces that you can use in all your projects, commercial and non commercial (desktop use only). No buy button necessary! Just click on the link to download the full versatile set. Enjoy it… and Merry Christmas! DOWNLOAD FULL PACK

Blacker Friday

Posted by Zetafonts in Promotion on Nov/2019

Super promotion! 50% off every font family of the catalogue using the promo code BLACK19 and 80% off the Blacker collection: Blacker Pro family, Blacker Sans family and Blackest family with the promo code BLACKER (valid until 2/Dec 2019).

Virus Fonts, London

Posted by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini in Studio Visits on Feb/2016

Jonathan Barnbrook is one of our design heroes. He created some of the most successful postmodern typefaces for Emigre, including Mason – now part of the digital collection of MOMA. He designed the definitive art book for Damien Hirst, I Want To Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now. In 1999 he participated in the First Things First Manifesto signed by graphic designers, students and photographers who proposed a reversal of priorities in the way graphic design was used commercially. He designed the covers for David Bowie…read more

New Bohemia, SF

Posted by Zetafonts in Studio Visits on Sep/2015

After meeting the owner Damon Styer at an AIGA meeting in San Francisco, we had a chance to visit his signpainting shop New Bohemia Signs – one of the longest running sign shop in San Francisco, dealing exclusively in hand painted signs. Located in 281 9th Street in the South of Market neighborood, New Bohemia is a beautiful sight for any letterform lover, with its wall covered in commercial signs side by side with pieces that were created by Damon for its own art shows. Damon Styer, owner of New Bohemia. “Practice is…read more

The Style Issue

Posted by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini in Trend Reports on Apr/2015

While working at the branding for Lucca Comics & Games Festival 2013, we were proposed an ambitious claim: “A Style Issue“. The organizers of Lucca Festival, a huge event with hundreds of thousands of attendees, wanted to renew their image combining a the pop imagery of comics, roleplaying games and videogames with the italian High Fashion tradition. A bold challenge, which included the art direction of the team of illustrators at Riot Games, more accustomed to League of Legends werewolves than to Paris’ catwalks. We choose a typographic branding, developing a…read more

It’s Bulletto Time

Posted by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini in New releases on Mar/2015

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

Typography Trend Report 2015

Posted by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini in Trend Reports on Jan/2015

Creative trends move fast. Digital communities, Behance first, understand this quite well. They work as a worldwide trend report, creating a network of shared influences and global trends not dissimilar to the ones that fashion designers are used to cope with. Not to be intended as simple copy and paste solutions, these dominant trends are useful to the designers to better understand cultural forces that shape visual taste, and to keep our design sense always fresh. Many of the dominant visual trends are linked to the mobile revolution. Each design project has today the…read more