Based in Florence, Italy, Zetafonts was founded by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Debora Manetti, and Francesco Canovaro well over a decade ago. Over the years that have passed since, the type foundry has collaborated with a number of graphic designers and typographers around the world. Zetafonts consistently releases high quality type designs rooted in innovative ideas, functionality and versatility through OpenType features, all wrapped up in a beautiful presentation.
Type designs crafted by Zetafonts have a characteristic of timelessness, regardless of a font’s given style or design. Art always meets application, yet their fonts remain adaptable enough to meet current aesthetics as design styles change with time.
Zetafonts’ complete body of work mirrors the foundry’s enthusiasm for excellent typography and their unwavering commitment to their industry. Most of Zetafonts’ type designs blend characteristics of both display and body text, providing a great deal of flexibility with their final applications.
One of Zetafonts’ most recent releases, Radcliffe, was a collaborative effort between Cosimo and Andrea Tartarelli.
When he isn’t working on type design for Zetafonts, Cosimo works as the creative director at Studio Kmzero, a studio that’s dedicated to visual art experimentation. Cosimo also works in fine art and illustration for his own projects, as well as his collective art project, The Ant Theatre.
Andrea studied at Belle Arti di Carrara and he lives in Pietrasanta. His background in typography, graphic design, and art direction has given him a foundation for crafting beautiful type designs with a high degree of functionality in practical applications.
To that end, Radcliffe is a sort of reinvention of the traditional Clarendon design. When Cosimo and Andrea set out to create Radcliffe, they were going after a “contemporary classic” look and they achieved that in spades. With strong bracketed serifs, vertical stress and Clarendon-style contrast, Radcliffe was refined with a more humanist touch. Its calligraphic approach is most noticeable in its italic lettersets.
Radcliffe was originally intended for use as a display typeface with a range of weights for logo design and editorial uses, but it’s been complemented by Radcliffe Text, which offers five weights with taller x-heights and slightly more condensed proportions that allow for maximum readability in longer texts.
To give designers even more to work with, this font family includes two “funky” weights with Radcliffe Casual. These two are a lot more laid back and far lighter on the elegance than the rest of the family. They’re considerably more fun at parties and they stand with a rather retro posture.
The entire Radcliffe family is well suited to a variety of projects, including displays, signage, advertising, headlines, editorials, publishing applications, corporate communications, letterhead, logos, branding, identity, product packaging, labels, and any design project that needs a cool, contemporary letter set.
Radcliffe is available in Light, Book, Regular, SemiBold, Bold, ExtraBold, and Heavy, with corresponding italics for each. Radcliffe Text is available in Light, Book, Regular, SemiBold and Bold, with corresponding italics for each. Radcliffe Casual is available in Regular and Bold.
All of Radcliffe’s letter sets offer additional features that include case sensitive forms, discretionary ligatures, denominators, numerators, fractions, lining figures, oldstyle figures, tabular figures, slashed zero, medial forms, ordinals, subscript, superscript, scientific inferiors, and stylistic alternates for fantastic versatility. Its multilingual support is extensive, too, covering Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Dutch, Afrikaans, Latin Ligatures, and Basic Cyrillic for extensive worldwide accessibility.
Zetafonts currently offers 48 products through YouWorkForThem, a range of serifs, sans serifs, display fonts and script lettersets to suit a wide variety of project types and themes. Visit their portfolio to view the rest of their work and if you love their stuff as much as we do, bookmark it so you can watch for new releases!