Established more than a decade ago, Zetafonts is a digital type foundry based in Florence, Italy. Founded by Debora Manetti, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, and Francesco Canovaro, Zetafonts focuses on crafting type designs that will stand the test of time, regardless of how design trends change as time passes.
With a thorough understanding of what graphic designers are seeking for their work, Zetafonts provides type designs that are not only driven by design aesthetics but versatility, as well. To that end, most of their work offers extensive OpenType features and multilingual support. Paired with letterforms that straddle the line between text and display, Zetafonts’ type designs are second to none.
Over the years that have passed since the foundry was established, Zetafonts has gone on to collaborate with a growing number of designers and typographers to create innovative type designs. One of their most recent releases is Blacker Pro, a “revised and extended version of the original wedge serif type family designed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli in 2017.”
Extended is an understatement; Blacker Pro is a superfamily of 69 didonesque letter sets in multiple widths and weights to suit design projects of all kinds. The Blacker family was originally designed as Zetafonts’ own take on the “evil serif” genre, a titled defined by Jeremia Shoaf to describe typefaces that featured high contrast, oldstyle or contemporary serif proportions and sharp triangular serifs.
The high contrast of Blacker Pro is what makes it reminiscent of classic didone type designs, with the addition of those knife-sharp triangular serifs. This family’s architecture is one that screams sophistication and elegance and its range of styles work beautifully in text applications, displays, and everywhere in between.
Blacker Pro Text, which also offers a Condensed variant, offers a comfortable reading experience and is ideal for long-form passages, publishing, editorials, headlines, magazines, websites, and any text-heavy design projects.
Blacker Pro Display is also well suited for text applications but offers tighter tracking, higher contrast and sharper corners for maximum impact in larger sizes. It’s a strong contender for headlines, subheadings, displays, signage, book covers and album art, logos, product packaging, merchandise, apparel, website headers and banners, and social media imagery.
Blacker Pro’s Titling versions offer a lot of design flexibility for titling projects, posters, flyers, marketing materials, book covers, album art, product packaging, merchandise, apparel, and more. Blacker Pro Titling offers decorative Inline and Diamond versions that add an entirely new level of elegance and sophistication to design projects.
The entire Blacker Pro family is well-suited to branding and identity projects that require design cohesion across multiple media types and sizes.
Each of Blacker Pro’s variants offers six weights that range from Light to Heavy, with corresponding italics in the Text and Display families. OpenType features for Text and Display include capitals to small caps, case-sensitive forms, fractions, discretionary and standard ligatures, subscript, superscript, oldstyle figures, tabular figures, and small caps for fantastic versatility.
Blacker Pro Titling offers a number of OpenType features as well, including capitals to small caps, case-sensitive forms, fractions, discretionary ligatures, oldstyle and tabular figures, subscript, superscript, and stylistic alternates.
The Blacker Pro family extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Vietnamese, Pan African Latin, Dutch, Pinyin, Venda, Igbo Onwu, Basic Greek, and Basic Cyrillic for incredible versatility in design projects aimed at an international audience.
If you like Blacker Pro but you’d like to give it a whirl before purchasing it, you can try Blacker Pro Display Medium Italic, Display Condensed Light, Text Light, Text Condensed Medium Italic, and Titling Bold for free!
Zetafonts currently offers 66 products through YouWorkForThem, a varied range of serifs, sans serifs, scripts, and display fonts to suit a variety of design projects. Visit their portfolio to take a look at the rest of their work and bookmark it so you can check back often for new releases!