Founded by Francesco Canovaro, Debora Manetti, and Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Zetafonts is nestled in the picturesque city of Florence, Italy, sharing workspace with Kmzero Design Studio. The Zetafonts type foundry has been crafting innovative and highly-sought-after typography for more than a decade, totaling more than 15 million downloads worldwide.
The foundry is known for offering a wide range of typographic styles that straddle the line between display and type, focusing on their designs’ usage in real-world settings. They strive to achieve a timeless quality with each and every one of their releases, never putting much weight into passing fads that won’t endure the test of time.
They do this by tackling each project with an approach that brings a solution to a design-related problem that other professionals may have. With experience in branding and graphic design, Zetafonts is able to anticipate the potential needs of designers and create type designs that grab their attention while providing a true asset to their tasks-at-hand.
Zetafonts set the bar where aesthetics meets perfect functionality, crafting type designs that are beautifully made and highly versatile in a designer’s workflow. Over the years, the foundry has worked with a growing number of designers and typographers to consistently develop an ever-expanding portfolio of work. While each one brings their own unique talents to the table, Zetafonts remains on the cutting-edge of type design.
One of their most recent releases is Boring Sans — an unexpected type design that is anything but boring.
Designed by founding member Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Boring Sans is a typeface family that was designed along two variable axes: “weight and weirdness.” These two parameters provide designers with a complete range of sans serif variations that begin with a neutral set of proportions and evolve into a striking, strongly-contrasted design that demands immediate attention.
The basic Boring Sans A subfamily behaves like any traditional workhorse sans serif, featuring finely-tuned proportions that yield a comfortable reading experience and little in the way of visual fanfare. It is well-suited to any application that would use a contemporary sans serif, including headlines and editorials, website designs, body copy, publishing, corporate communications, white papers, infographics, marketing materials, business cards, tags, labels, and mobile applications.
The Boring Sans B subfamily was developed with more of a “contemporary ‘brutal’ approach” to its design, featuring stronger contrast, deep ink traps, and slanted lines. It’s the best of both worlds — a middle-of-the-road sans serif design that leans into its funkier side just a little bit more. It’s beautiful in headlines and subheadings, logos, product packaging, marketing materials, social media imagery, book covers and album artwork, posters, titling, and even comics.
The Boring Sans C subfamily takes the same brutal approach to the extreme, resulting in “a bombastic show of exuberant weirdness.” Boring Sans C is playful and strange in the best way, standing with a confident posture that wears its unusual curves with pride. This subfamily is best suited to bold displays, signage, headlines, logos, product packaging, merchandise, apparel designs, posters, book covers, and album artwork that needs an eye-catching and one-of-a-kind type design as the focal point.
Each subfamily within Boring Sans is available in Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, and Heavy, with corresponding italics for each.
Boring Sans A provides case-sensitive forms, localized forms, and stylistic alternates through OpenType. Boring Sans B and C offer the same, along with ordinals and superscript for added versatility. The entire family extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, and Dutch for projects intended for a global audience.
If you’re intrigued by Boring Sans but aren’t completely sure, Boring Sans A Demo Bold, Boring Sans B Demo Bold, and Boring Sans C Demo Bold are available to try for free!
Zetafonts currently offers 70 products through YouWorkForThem, an expansive body of work that includes serifs, slab serifs, sans serifs, scripts, and display fonts — something for just about every design project! Visit their portfolio to take a look at the rest of their work and bookmark it so you can check back for new releases as they arrive!
