Based in the beautiful setting of Florence, Italy, Zetafonts is a collaborative type studio and foundry that designs contemporary letter sets with a lot of versatility. Established by Francesco Canovaro, Debora Manetti, and Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini more than ten years ago, the designers who work with Zetafonts are masters of their craft, always seeking to create type designs “real usage in mind.”
Keeping their eye on design trends, they strive to create character sets that will withstand the test of time – never capitalizing on the latest “fads” in type design without first considering how a design will stay relevant for years and decades to come. In that way, Zetafonts consistently manages to create type designs with a timeless appeal, never going out of style no matter how design trends change over time.
As a foundry, Zetafonts really sets a high bar for type design, embracing a work ethic that prizes innovation, experimentation, and creativity. They typically prefer simplicity over elaborate aesthetics, citing that overly-ornate type designs can be overpowered by personalities that are just a little too strong. Because versatility is a key element of every design, their fonts tend to straddle the middle ground between display and body text, giving graphic designers plenty of flexibility in their work.
Over the years, Zetafonts has worked with a growing number of graphic designers and typographers from around the world. The foundry is dedicated to the craft of typography, building a portfolio of work that puts their enthusiasm on display.
One of Zetafonts’ most recent releases is Codec Pro, a “veritable Swiss knife for the designer.” This Swiss-inspired sans serif is actually the newest incarnation of the 2017 Codec family designed by Francesco Canovaro, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, and Andrea Tartarelli. It began as research on the subtleties and variations of the original geometric sans serif design of Codec, completely redesigned and expanded for an even greater range of creative possibilities.
To that end, the Codec Pro family is available in Thin, ExtraLight, Light, News, Regular, Bold, ExtraBold, Heavy, Ultra, UltraBlack, and Fat, with corresponding italics for each. This range of weights makes it perfectly suited for just about anything you can imagine, including bold signage, displays, posters, logos, letterhead, corporate communications, white papers, website designs, mobile applications, product packaging and informational inserts, merchandise, labels, tags, business cards, publishing, infographics, and marketing materials. It’s ideal for branding and identity projects that require design cohesion across multiple media types and sizes.
For those working with software that supports variable fonts, Codec Pro includes a Variable version that enables designers to maintain absolute control over the appearance of this type design in their workflow!
Codec Pro is loaded with OpenType features that include capitals to small caps, case-sensitive forms, localized forms, terminal forms, medial forms, initial forms, fractions, discretionary ligatures, required ligatures, ordinals, subscript, superscript, scientific inferiors, oldstyle figures, tabular figures, slashed zero, small caps, stylistic alternates, and swash for incredible versatility.
Codec Pro’s multilingual support is extensive, as well, covering Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Dutch, Igbo Onwu, Basic Greek, Basic Cyrillic, Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu for truly global accessibility.
Zetafonts currently offers 67 products through YouWorkForThem, including a range of serifs, sans serifs, scripts, and display typefaces for design projects of all kinds. Visit their portfolio to check out the rest of their work and bookmark it so you can watch for new releases!
