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.

A NEW HOPE! You begged with us..! You pleaded with us..! But we decided to release the official Richard Starkings font anyway! Huh? WHAT? You heard that line before? Where? Hmm... on this very site...? Well, yes, the Hedge Backwards font is all fine and dandy and does resemble the lettering legerdemain of comic book lettering robot, Richard Starkings... but has it been tweaked over the years to better suit the writing stylings of ELEPHANTMEN creator and writer, Richard Starkings? Has it been refurbished and digitally remastered by ELEPHANTMEN designer and Comicraft Secret Weapon, John JG Roshell? Hmm? No? Well then... here it is, retooled, reimagined and reStarkingsed...ah, what the hell, we started from scratch! This ain't no Greedo Shoots First -- you won't have to keep your pasty '70s VHS recordings of previous Richard Starkings Fonts inside a concrete bunker. Because any other font that claimed to be the official Richard Starkings font would have been called The Official Richard Starkings Font, would it not?

The Englishman William Caslon (1672–1766) first cut his typeface Caslon in 1725. His major influences were the Dutch designers Christoffel van Dijcks and Dirck Voskens. The Caslon font was long known as the script of kings, although on the other side of the political spectrum, the Americans used it as well for their Declaration of Independence. The characteristics of the earlier Renaissance typefaces are only barely detectable. The serifs are finer and the axis of the curvature is almost or completely vertical. The overall impression which Caslon makes is serious, elegant and linear. Next to Baskerville, Caslon is known as the embodiment of the English Baroque-Antiqua and has gone through numerous new interpretations, meaning that every Caslon is slightly different. American Type Founders presented a Caslon in 1905 which is true to the forms of the original. This font is relatively wide and comes complete with small caps and old style figures.

Beardstown is solid, hardworking & no-nonsense. It may be a little gritty & rough around the edges, but it can also be open, warm and welcoming. Beardstown is a little Midwestern town on a river with a town square where you can buy comic books from a spinner rack at the front of the drugstore and read 'em with a root beer float from the soda counter in the back. The Beardstown font is perfect for t-shirts, sports graphics, beer cans, trading cards, carnival posters and record albums. But that’s it. I mean, you could use it on foofy hipster stuff like organic produce, vegan meat substitutes, electric car accessories or mountain bike parts, but you risk Beardstown coming over there to kick your butt. Features: three versions of each letter and two versions of each number automatically rotate for authentic print texture thirteen catchwords (like "and" "of" "for" & "the") accessible in Discretionary Ligatures support for 223 languages including Western & Central Europe, Vietnamese & Cyrillic

“My Dearest Friend” is how she began nearly all her letters to her husband, John. I refer, of course, to Abigail Smith Adams, first Second Lady and second First Lady of the United States. Her famous correspondence with John Adams produced nearly 1,200 letters over a span of some 40 years, leaving us with a priceless record of early American life — from household routines to war and politics to expressions of personal worry and devotion. Although Abigail’s was not the loveliest hand, I found it sure and expressive, as befitting her extraordinary sway and intelligence; it also carries a genuine flavor of the period. In making the font I focused chiefly on her handwriting from the 1780s and ’90s, when she’d taken to using a disconnected cursive, which struck me as distinctive and alluring. The OpenType release of Abigail Adams has scores of ligatures, standard and contextual alternates, lining and old-style figures, cross-outs, ink blots, and full Latin language support.

Blacker mono was developed out of a brief by Isabella Ahmadzadeh, by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Francesco Canovaro for the editorial project "A beautiful mistake" by OFFF Tlv in 2022. It is a monospaced version of our typeface Blacker, bringing its "evil serif" aesthetics in the realm of typewriter and coding typefaces. In designing these, usually the letterforms are deformed to better fill the space, but in Blacker Mono only the serifs are modified to balance letters, while letter skeletons are kept consistent with the ones of the original Blacker family. This gives the typeface an uneven, unexpected rhythm, underlined by the unusual choice of providing three optical sizes and some extreme display weights - both uncommon choices in monospaced fonts. The resulting typefamily is thought for use in editorial situations where readability must be married by a strong personality, and is complemented by all the wide array of Open Type features that are present in all Blacker variants, from positional numerals to small case letters and alternates.

Basic Commercial is a family of fonts based on historical designs from the hot metal type era. First appearing around 1900, these designs were created by type designers whose names have not been recorded, but whose skills cannot be overlooked. These typefaces were popular among groups and movements as diverse as the Bauhaus, Dadaism, and the masters of Swiss/International-Style typography. They influenced a variety of later grotesque fonts, such as Helvetica and Univers. Basic Commercial was distributed for many years in the United States under the name Standard Series. The typeface worked its way into many aspects of daily life and culture; for instance, it became the face chosen for use in the New York City subway system’s signage. The Basic Commercial family members have a clear and objective design. Their forms exhibit almost nothing unusual, but remain both lively and legible nonetheless. Perhaps for this reason, Basic Commercial’s design has been popular with graphic designers for decades.

The Englishman William Caslon (1672-1766) first cut his typeface Caslon in 1725. His major influences were the Dutch designers Christoffel van Dijcks and Dirck Voskens. The Caslon font was long known as the script of kings, although on the other side of the political spectrum, the Americans used it as well for their Declaration of Independence. The characteristics of the earlier Renaissance typefaces are only barely detectable. The serifs are finer and the axis of the curvature is almost or completely vertical. The overall impression which Caslon makes is serious, elegant and linear. Next to Baskerville, Caslon is known as the embodiment of the English Baroque-Antiqua and has gone through numerous new interpretations, meaning that every Caslon is slightly different. Caslon Classico appeared in 1993 and was designed by Franco Luin, the designer of various interpretations of classic typefaces. Luin kept his design true to the original and Caslon Classico consists of two cuts with corresponding italic and small caps characters.

Drystick is a Sans Serif typographic family of Geo-Grotesque style with 8 pesos plus the italic versions all include small capital letters the symbol of Bitcoin (b #) and other cryptocurrency symbols. It is a geometric typography, minimalist, with neo-grotesque modulations. The typeface has alternative letters and numbers, small caps and advanced OpenType functions. The Italic versions have some of their own characters (&, @, Q, a, g, y), these versions have many optical corrections to balance the deformations created in many curves by the mere inclination of the letters, which in the case of This typography is 9 °. The drawn of the vectors is careful to obtain smooth curves and elegant appearance, the thicker versions have ink traps in the joints of the joints to use in small sizes. The Metric and the Kerning of all the versions I have reviewed individually to obtain maximum readability in any type of text and size.

Jeanne Moderno is a revisionary type family. A synthesis of Bodoni Italic and 19th Century Ultra-Bold "Fat Faces"—distilled with personality taken from early 20th Century Modernists; the Futurists, Dadaists, Suprematists, Constructivists. Historically, Jeanne Moderno could have appeared on the scene around 1918—after the First World War—when new cultural movements, manifestos, theories and countertheories shaped art, industry and society. Spatter in a few later influences—from De Stijl, the Bauhaus, the types of Herbert Bayer, Josef Albers, Paul Renner—plus a twist of Art Deco and High Fashion—Jeanne Moderno is a remanifestation of 19th + 20th Century Modernist thinking; traditional + revisionist, raw and elegant! Jeanne Moderno can best be used for magazines, advertising, posters, flyers, fashion reports, letterpress experiments, silkscreen endeavors, exhibitions, DMV signage, paper money, revolutionary political statements as well as formal declarations of peace or war. Jeanne Moderno is about the future, the past. The Avant-Garde. Humanist geometry + vintage footwear. Form, function, style, art and life.

Gothic Tuscan One is a all-cap condensed gothic with round terminals and decorative “tuscan” center spurs. It was first shown by William H. Page of Norwich, Connecticut among his wood type specimen pages of 1859. Gothic Tuscan One exemplifies the strength of decorative wood types: large, simple type forms that provide the visual boldness sought by advertisers of the Victorian period. While our marketing has gotten so very sophisticated, there is always a place for simple, visually strong typeface. Although about 14 miles inland, Norwich lies at the head of the Thames River. The river is both wide and deep, and therefore was not bridged in the early 20th century. From the 17th century until then, if you wanted to get from Groton on the west bank to the whaling port of New London on the east bank by land, you had to had to go by way of Norwich. Because of its size, the Thames is navigable all the way from Norwich to New London. Docks were built in Norwich around 1685 and the city became Connecticut’s 2nd largest port by 1800. With the construction of the Norwich & Worcester Railroad in 1835, Page could easily ship his wood type north by rail or south by coastal schooner. Included with our font, Gothic Tuscan One, are two 19th century printer’s ornaments of sailing ships similar to those that sailed up the Thames to Norwich. There is also a more contemporary glyph of a whale, looking quite pleased that the only whaling ship left in Connecticut is the Charles W. Morgan, permanently moored at Mystic Seaport. Reference: Moon’s Handbooks, Connecticut 2nd Edition (Emeryville CA 2004). Gothic Tuscan One ML represents a major extension of the original release, with the following changes: 1. Added glyphs for the 1250 Central Europe, the 1252 Turkish and the 1257 Baltic Code Pages. Added glyphs to complete standard 1252 Western Europe Code Page. Special glyphs relocated and assigned Unicode codepoints, some in Private Use area. Total of 332 glyphs. 2. Added OpenType GSUB layout features: pnum, ornm and dlig. 3. Added 330 kerning pairs. 4. Revised vertical metrics for improved cross-platform line spacing. 5. Redesigned mathamatical operators 6. Included of both tabular (std) & proportional numbers (optional). 7. Refined various glyph outlines. Please note that some older applications may only be able to access the Western Europe character set (approximately 221 glyphs). The zip package includes two versions of the font at no extra charge. There is an OTF version which is in Open PS (Post Script Type 1) format and a TTF version which is in Open TT (True Type)format. Use whichever works best for your applications.

Morris is a four-font family produced by HiH Retrofonts and based on the work of the very English William Morris. William Morris wanted a gothic type drawn from the 14th century blackletter tradition that he admired both stylistically and philosophically. He drew from several sources. His principal inspiration for his lower case was the 1462 Bible by Peter Schoeffer of Mainz; particularly notable for the first appearance of the ‘ear’ on the g. The upper case was Morris’s amalgam of the Italian cursive closed caps popular throughout the 12th through 15th centuries, a modern example of which is Goudy’s Lombardic Capitals. The gothic that Morris designed was first used by his Kelmscott Press for the publication of the Historyes Of Troye in 1892. It was called “Troy Type” and was cut at 18 points by Edward Prince. It was also used for The Tale of Beowulf. The typeface was re-cut in at 12 points and called “Chaucer Type” for use in The Order of Chivalry and The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Morris' objective is designing his gothic was not only to preserve the color and presence of his sources, but to create letters that were more readable to the English eye. ATF copied Troy and called it Satanick. Not only was the ATF version popular in the United States; but, interestingly, sold very well in Germany. There was great interest in that country in finding a middle ground between blackletter and roman styles -- one that was comfortable for a wider readership. The Morris design was considered one of the more successful solutions. Our interpretation, which we call Morris Gothic, substantially follows the Petzendorfer model used by other versions we have seen, with the following exceptions: 1) a larger fillet radius on the upper arm of the H, 2) a more typically broadpen stroke in place of the foxtail on the Q, which I do not like, 3) inclusion of the aforementioned ear on the g and 4) a slightly shorter descender on the y. We have included five ornaments, at positions 0135, 0137, 0167, 0172 and 0177. The German ligatures ‘ch’ & ‘ck’ can be accessed using the left and right brace keys (0123 & 0125). Morris Initials One and Morris Initials Two are two of several different styles of decorative initial letters that Morris designed for use with his type. He drew from a variety of 15th century sources, among which were Peter Schoeffer’s 1462 Mainz Bible and the lily-of-the-valley alphabet by Gunther Zainer of Augsburg. Each of the two initial fonts is paired with the Morris Gothic lower case. Morris Ornaments is a collection of both text ornaments and forms from the surrounding page-border decorations.