Q. Welcome to SandollCloud! Zetafonts, please tell us a bit about your foundry.

 

Established in 2001 by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Francesco Canovaro, and Debora Manetti, Zetafonts is an independent type foundry located in Florence, Italy. Combining Italian heritage with trend research and a pop culture approach, our foundry has crafted over the years an impressive portfolio of over 100 typeface families, historical revivals, and custom fonts. Zetafonts values and promotes international typographic culture through the organization of educational programs, talks and courses with its Type Campus and Fight for Kindness initiatives.
 

 

Q. What are the keywords that describe your foundry well? And why? 

Zetafonts is about making typography fun, inclusive and functional. Our typeface projects often start from display and branding usage, and then are developed to cover all possible functionalities by including text variants, alternate glyphs, positional numerals, and wide language coverage.

 

 

Q. What distinguishes your foundry from others? What are your unique appeals and strengths? 

 

Our design philosophy stems from our history and our 20+ years of experience in the field of branding, visual design and advertising. We try to develop fonts that are as beautiful as they are useful, and that are reliable working tools for graphic designers, art directors and brand managers around the world. For this reason, unlike many competitors, we like to develop type families with a strong problem solving attitude, tested against the needs of the contemporary media landscape. In a rapid-evolving market, where design is more and more inspired by quick-moving trends and epocal cultural changes worldwide, typefaces have to be meaningful to be relevant.
 

 

Q. Who would you particularly recommend your foundry’s fonts to? 

Our main goal is to make not only good fonts, but tools to help designers at any level. Beginners can enjoy our most playful display weights, professionals can appreciate the hours spent in developing Open Type Features or enhancing the glyph set for the widest language coverage. Zetafonts are for every designer (or non designer) who loves good typography.

 

 

Q. What are your representative retail font families? 

 

Our most successful typefaces are  「Cocogoose」, 「Heading」, and 「Codec」.

 

 

Q. Can you tell us about the background behind developing these fonts?

「Cocogoose」 and 「Codec」 are two fonts in the so-called “geometric sans” style which is one of the most useful and widespread typographic style around. 「Heading」 is a grotesque sans with a very wide range of widths: its main goal is to be used for editorial purpose to solve any spacing / display problem, allowing to fit your text in any space with the maximum effect.

 

 

Q. What is the meaning of their name? 

「Cocogoose」 got its name from the superfamily 「Coco」, created for use in the fashion field and developed in a series of stylistic variation. 「Heading」 is a straightforward explication of its intended use, while 「Codec」 wants to connect to digital technology and also with the idea of a shared language. It’s one of our most expanded typeface and the one we would like to extend to Hangul in the future.

 

 

Q. How would you recommend to using "the representative fonts"? 

「Cocogoose」 , 「Heading」 , and 「Codec」 are all fonts that work very well in display use, when you want a logo or a title to be very strong, readable and recognizable. At the same time, they have text variants that allow typesetting of text in a very readable way and are perfect for longer body text.

 

 

 

Q. Are there any memorable Fonts-in-use cases for Zetafonts?

「Codec」 has been used by many companies worldwide, including Disney that used it in their Disney EMEA project, realized by Flopicco Agency. 「Heading」 typeface has been used by both italian magazine L'Espresso and by game publisher Epic Games for the videogame Fortnite: something that demonstrates how a good typeface can work as well on digital screens as on paper pages.

 

 

 

 

Q. Are there any other fonts you'd like to recommend from your library? 

We wanted to have our best fonts on SandollCloud, this is why we also added 「Arsenica」, 「Calvino」, and 「Blacker」  - three families that can provide designers with elegant and striking serif design solutions. Designers who love the nostalgic vibes that are so trendy in contemporary design will love 「Bogart」 and 「Freitag」; those who like avantgarde experimental type will enjoy 「Bakemono」 and 「Asgard」 , and the ones who need a timeless grotesque classic can use our 「Milligram」.

 

 

 

 

Q. Please leave a message to SandollCloud users! 

“Always put fun in functionality…”

 

 

 

Q. What are your future plans for retail fonts? 

 

Zetafonts developes usually 5-10 new typeface families every year. We have a section on the website, called Beat, where we publish our fonts-in-progress for users to try and provide feedback to. We plan to keep producing both reinventions of classic typefaces as well as weird and original experiments, so please keep an eye out and stay tuned!