Trapped home during the Coronavirus outburst of March 2020 the Zetafonts team found some solace from the world-wide anxiety by designing letters for the #36daysoftype challenge. To fight dark thoughts and spread some good karma we decided to add a free font twist, selecting the best glyphs drawn to develop a collection of ten free typefaces for download. We did our best to make this little gift to the community valuable, though developed in record time: although playful and excessive, these typefaces all stem from our current research in contemporary trends and historical design solutions, bridging calligraphy and design. The typefaces have been published daily starting Monday, March 30. You can download and use the typefaces in any way you desire, as they are totally free for commercial and non-commercial use. We are not asking anything back, but feel free to share the good karma and, if you want, please consider a donation for hospitals.

This is an idea to reproduce the masks of the Mexican wrestlers of the late 60s and 70s. The typography is based in keeping the shape of the face in the wrestler's masks.

The name FeggoliteHatched comes from the fact that it was created with the help of an old font manipulation program called Incubator Pro. It was an attempt to create a more conventional typeface from the odd monospaced font, FeggoliteMono. As a monospaced font, FeggoliteHatched could be considered a typewriter face, but no typewriter ever produced letters like these. The original version from 1994 is now the italic style and it has a leftward or back slant. The upright or plain version was added much later, in 2018. There is also a choppy upright version included in this family.

George Ryan’s font of typographic ornaments and borders, available as a free download from Galápagos.

Strongbox JNL is based in part on an incomplete sample of an old wood type alphabet seen on an image sharing site. Commonly known as a grotesk (or grotesque) face, this style of sans serif lettering is well-suited for headlines, display work, price cards or anything where a bold, condensed typeface is needed.

The Quandary Font is created for a horror theme in use with an illustrated book ‘The Predicament’ by Edgar Allan Poe. It is designed as a highly expressive face to accentuate a sense of mystery and the macabre. A comparatively more carefree and free-spirited face, it comes as a uni-case single weight family used exclusively as the main face for the book. The characters are developed from the numeric glyphs found on the astronomical clock-face at Prague Old Town Square, Czech Republic. http://www.behance.net/gallery/Quandary/383204

Based on some examples of a Clarendon-inspired wood type design, Clarenwood JNL is a bold and effective titling font which harkens back to old times and advertising on a grander scale.

Life was designed in 1964 by W. Bilz and marks the beginning of a new generation of newsprint fonts. The Ionic style had replaced Modern Face and was now replaced by this new innovative style, which mixed elements of Old Face, Transitional and Modern Face forms. Life’s characters are based on the forms of Times and are the result of a time of change and experimentation.

A 1964 piece of sheet music entitled “Old Soldiers Never Die (They Just Fade Away)” was based on the farewell speech General Douglas MacArthur gave to Congress on April 19, 1951. This particular edition of the song sheet had part of his speech (as well as its title) hand lettered in a free-form sans serif reminiscent of the lettering done by such noted lettering artists as Paul Coker and Saul Bass. The casual and playful style of this type design became the inspiration for Swing Vote JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Hagenbeck is an old style font face with the intention to get really bold. It's a design from 2019, drawn during a rainy stay in the eponymous district in Hamburg, the designers ‘hood for a long time. There is the bold weight and a decorative stamped version of this font face.

Copacabana is heavily based on one of my favourite typefaces Goudy Old Style Italic. It is sharper and more clearly defined than Goudy yet still retains it old style characteristics. The face is slightly angled so is basically upright whilst still retaining Italic characteristics.

Woodlawn JNL is based on an open face wood type. A bold outline sans, this design is excellent for headline and titling applications.

An elegant face with dashing swash caps, based on an old American Type Founders typeface called Canterbury. The Opentype version of this font supports Unicode 1250 (Central European) languages, as well as Unicode 1252 (Latin) languages.

Allust Italic is an Upright italic font that is inspired by italic version some old-style serif typefaces specimen and an from my own flawed italic letterforms back in 2016. Download the cheat sheet for Allust Italic Ornament here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yz1rvdopxm6mwva/Allust%20Italic%20Ornament%20Cheat%20Sheet.pdf?dl=0

Corsham was inspired by traditional stonemason's engraved lettering designs. Designed to be used alone, or in combination with our Corton family, it has wonderfully lively air, with distinctive lively serifs and beautifully swashed downstrokes. Four faces are offered-regular bold and black weights as well as a condensed form. All faces include a range of Opentype features, including ligatures and old-style numerals. The Corsham faces merge 'olde-worlde' charm with fun character, yet remaining clear and legible for text use.