For many years license plates in Italy have been using a quite peculiar sans serif monospace typeface with slightly rounded corners and a geometric, condensed skeleton. These letterforms have been used by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini as an inspiration for Targa, published as the first-ever Zetafonts typeface in 2003. Almost twenty years later, Francesco Canovaro has brought the project under scrutiny for a complete redesign, keeping its inventions, solving its issues, and making it into a versatile multi-weight typeface. The original type family has been developed in two subfamilies: Targa Pro Mono (which keeps the original monospace widths) and Targa Pro Roman (with proportional widths), both in five weights plus italics. The original family also included the handmade version Targa Hand which has been paired with a new Targa Pro Stencil to allow for more versatility and choice for display use. All weights of Targa Pro feature an extended latin character set covering over 200 languages, as well as a full set of Open Type features including positional numbers, alternates and stylistic sets. Halfway between postmodern appropriation of utilitarian design and rationalist design, Targa Pro sits comfortably at the crossroads between artificial nostalgia and modernist functionality, ready to surprise the user with its versatility and quirky Italian flavour.

Sonovovitch is a unicase display typeface inspired by the Russian Constructivist movement and Soviet Cold War era propaganda. Although a faux Russian font, Sonovovitch has language support for the true Cyrillic alphabet. Originally intended as an exercise in downsizing the typical font’s character set, Sonovovitch quickly expanded in the opposite direction, adding multiple variations for letterforms and utilizing Open Type features allowing for easy substitution of glyphs… creating plenty of variety for letter combinations. Open Type “Titling Alternates” even substitute completely foreign glyphs, never seen before in any language, allowing for totally alien typesetting. The results found in Sonovovitch are packed with bold character and eastern European influenced flair. Sonovovitch’s eclectic geometric forms lend itself to a multitude of graphic applications; from serious branding programmes, to light-hearted packaging, to sports jerseys, to hand-crafted DIY projects.

In 1972, VGC released two typefaces by designer friends Dick Jensen and Harry Villhardt. Jensen’s was called Serpentine, and Villhardt’s was called Venture. Even though both faces had the same elements and a somewhat similar construct, one of them became very popular and chased the other away from the spotlight. Serpentine went on to become the James Bond font, the Pepsi and every other soda pop font, the everything font, all the way through the glories of digital lala-land where it was hacked, imitated and overused by hundreds of designers. But the only advantage it really had over Venture was being a 4-style family, including the bold italic that made it all the rage, as opposed to Venture’s lone upright style. One must wonder how differently things would have played if a Venture Italic was around back then. Chopper is Canada Type’s revival of Venture, that underdog of 1972. This time around it comes with a roman, an italic, and corresponding biform styles to make it a much more attractive and refreshing alternative to Serpentine. Chopper comes in all popular formats, boasts extended language support, and contains a ton of alternate characters sprinkled throughout the character map.

Poleno is a custom typeface originally designed in 2006 for the Slovak folk dance ensemble Poleno, as a part of their corporate identity. Ever since, new weights have been added to complete six variables and two different options for accents. The typeface adds a fresh, bold and non-rational feeling to headlines and titles in books and posters in display sizes where emphasis and detail are equally important. Randomly-generated contextual alternates included in the family contribute to add a distinctive look to words with repeating characters, whenever they occur next to each other. The difference between the Poleno Set and the Poleno Alt Set is in the accented characters. In the first one, accents are merged with the characters and in Alt version, accents are separated from the characters.

Adrenalina was created in 2003-2007. In 2014 the project was revised and became a font family. The character set was drawn through digital manipulation from photos of pichações taken in São Paulo - Brazil. Pixação is a form of tagging that comes from Brazilian graffiti writers. This style of pichação (or pixação) is also known as tag reto (straight tag).