Established by Francesco Canovaro, Debora Manetti, and Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Zetafonts is one of Italy’s most well-known and respected type foundries. The Florence-based studio is dedicated to crafting fonts that will stand the test of time, regardless of how popular design styles come and go. They’ve noted that the font industry is rather akin to that of fashion; with so many designers influencing one another while following what’s trendy at the moment, it can be difficult to get noticed. Zetafonts prefers design styles that embrace originality while also achieving a timelessness that will keep their work relevant for years and decades to come.
That’s where their experience comes into play. With a strong foundation in branding and identity and thorough knowledge of the graphic design industry, Zetafonts manages to create fresh and innovative typography that suits the varied needs of designers around the world. They’re not afraid to experiment for the sake of experimentation, but they make sure to attend to the functionality and application of every letter set they release. Much thought is given to concept, design, and testing to ensure their fonts perform well in the digital workspace.
For that reason, Zetafonts has solidified itself as a source of top-notch design tools and assets for graphic designers. Between a font’s architecture, its functionality, and its multilingual support, Zetafonts’ work consistently provides stellar flexibility for international projects.
Over the years since Zetafonts was founded, it has collaborated with a growing number of typographers, including Andrea Tartarelli and Maria Chiara Fantini. Andrea and Maria worked with Francesco on one of Zetafonts’ most recent releases, Kitsch.
Kitsch is a contemporary blackletter typeface “happily living at the crossroads between classical Latin and medieval gothic letterforms.” This wasn’t to be a historical revival of classic designs like Rotunda or Bastarda, however. When they worked on its structure, the designers wanted to create something that found its inspiration in those letterforms but in a fresh and modern way.
The result is a type design that carries a contemporary aesthetic through broad-nib pen strokes that adhere to the proportions of a Roman skeleton. Kitsch’s high contrast and spiky detailing make it well suited for display applications. To make it more versatile, a finely tuned text variant was crafted to improve legibility in small sizes, without losing any of the expressiveness of the family’s architecture.
Kitsch is available in Extralight, Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, Extrabold, and Black, with corresponding italics for each. Kitsch Text is available in Extralight, Light, Book, Regular, Medium, Bold, Extrabold, and Black, with corresponding italics for each. Zetafonts noted that special care was given to the design of the italic letterforms of Kitsch, using broad-nib movements that give reference to classical Italian letterforms. The alternate lettering shapes are included in the Roman variants as stylistic alternates in OpenType.
“Kitsch is fashionable but solid, self-confident enough to look classic while ironic enough to be contemporary,” Zetafonts said. The entire range of styles and weights make this family beautifully suited to design projects of all kinds, including headlines, text blocks, displays, signage, publishing, logos, product packaging, merchandise, promotional and marketing materials, website designs, and mobile applications. It’s a great choice for branding and identity projects that require design cohesion across multiple media types and sizes.
With more than 1,000 glyphs, Kitsch is packed with additional OpenType features that include capitals to small caps, case sensitive forms, fractions, discretionary ligatures, standard ligatures, alternate annotation, slashed zero, tabular figures, oldstyle figures, ordinals, subscript, superscript, small caps, and stylistic alternates for incredible versatility. It extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Dutch, Igbo Onwu, Basic Greek, and Basic Cyrillic for graphic design projects intended for an international audience.
If you’re curious but unsure, Kitsch Text Extralight and Kitsch Extrabold Italic are available to try for free! Right now through July 21, 2019, Kitsch is on sale for 85% off of its regular price so it’s a great time to add this family to your collection!
Zetafonts currently offers 61 products through YouWorkForThem, providing a wide range of type designs for projects of all kinds. Visit their portfolio to view the rest of their work and bookmark it so you can check back for new additions as they arrive!