For more than a decade, Zetafonts has been releasing some of the most beautiful typography available on the commercial market. Their type designs are consistent across the board, featuring letter sets that are aesthetically flawless, highly versatile, and incredibly functional in every design application.
Established by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Francesco Canovaro, and Debora Manetti, Zetafonts always manages to design letter sets that carry a timeless quality. No matter how much current design trends change over time, their work maintains a relevance that never goes out of style.
Over the years, the Florence-based type foundry has worked with a growing number of typographers. Their studio is one of creativity and collaboration, of innovation and experimentation, and perhaps most importantly – brilliance and dedication. Their singular goal is to create type designs that graphic designers will use to craft their own unique works of art, whether that’s in marketing, product package design, signage, or layout.
For Zetafonts, fluidity in design is important and they take strides to ensure that their type designs will work well in projects of all kinds. To that end, most of their work tends to straddle the line between display and text, giving graphic designers plenty of flexibility in their work.
One of their more recent releases is Extenda, a variable-width sans serif family. Designed by Francesco Canovaro, Andrea Tartarelli, and Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Extenda was designed to offer a versatile tool for bold designs that make the most of vertical space.
Strong yet condensed, Extenda is a dramatic sans serif with 11 widths that range from the ridiculously lean Pica to the heavy-footed Exa. “Rather than providing a family of weights,” Zetafonts began, Extenda “gives you a fine-grained range of widths to choose from, allowing maximum control in display editorial uses and proportional size variation in logo design.” Regardless of the width you choose to work with, Extenda offers consistent appearance and readability throughout.
If you’re looking for a tall, lanky sans serif, Pica, Nano, and Micro are your best bets. Midsize widths include Deca, Hecto, Mega, and Giga, all of which work well for subheadings, titling, and any design application that needs a condensed letter set that’s bold without being bulky. Extenda’s strongest widths are Tera, Peta, Exa, and Yotta, each standing strong and wide with an undeniable presence that won’t be missed in headlines, displays, signage, posters, book covers, and any other design application that needs a hefty sans serif with a lot of personality.
Extenda offers one special weight, Extendable, which uses OpenType scripts to create a dynamically scaling typeface; as you’re typing, each letter in Extendable automatically becomes tighter or wider than the previous one.
Extenda’s letter sets are loaded with additional OpenType features that include capitals to small caps, case sensitive forms, numerators, denominators, fractions, discretionary ligatures, historical ligatures, standard ligatures, alternate annotation, terminal forms, initial forms, lining figures, oldstyle figures, tabular figures, slashed zero, subscript, superscript, small caps, and stylistic alternates for fantastic versatility.
Extenda’s multilingual support extends to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Vietnamese, Pan African Latin, Dutch, Afrikaans, Pinyin, Igbo Onwu, Basic Greek, and Basic Cyrillic, covering more than 200 international languages for design projects aimed at a global market.
Zetafonts currently offers 51 products through YouWorkForThem, a gorgeous range of display fonts, serifs, sans serifs, and script designs to suit projects of all kinds. Visit their portfolio and if you love what you see, bookmark it so you can check back often for new releases!
