Since their first appearance as Italians on the pages of the 1821 William Caslon type specimens, reverse contrast typefaces have been typography's best loved quirky outcasts. Subverting the traditional relationship between thick verticals and thin horizontals made them perfect for eye-catching advertisements. The unexpected contrasts and the thick slabs produced by reverse-contrast serifs became ubiquitous in period posters, and synonymous with wild west and circus iconography. In designing Stinger, the Zetafonts design team composed by Maria Chiara Fantini, Andrea Tartarelli and Francesco Canovaro and orchestrated by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini decided to marry this subversive tradition with the workhorse approach of modernist sans serif typefaces like Univers, developing a super-family with four widths, each in five different weights, from thin to heavy. This gives the designer a full range of options for type setting, with the Normal and Fit widths providing two different text-sized alternatives, the wide width adding display and titling options and the Slim ready to deal with the space-saving necessities of extremely long texts. True italics have been added developed for all weights and variants, bringing the Stinger family to a total of 40 fonts, with a latin extended + Russian Cyrillic character set covering over 200 languages, and open type features including positional numbers, stylistic sets and alternate forms. In the crowded panorama of contemporary grotesque typefaces, all aiming to stark geometric perfection, Stinger stands out with its bold choices and strong personality. From the calligraphy-inspired terminals in the thin weights to the logo-ready sculptural approach in the heavy weights, each variant manages to look striking without forgetting the readability and flexibility lessons of modern reverse-contrast classics like those designed by Excoffon or Novarese. A variable version is included with the full family, allowing maximum flexibility and control for the designer over the wide range of expression capabilities of the Stinger super family.

In 1459, while visiting his dying mother, Italian painter Piero della Francesca spent seven days creating a fresco of a pregnant madonna in a small country church in the hilltown of Monterchi (Italy). Hailed today as one of the masterpieces of Italian Renaissance, the fresco was given a new branding in 2019 by Art Director Riccardo Falcinelli who asked the Zetafonts team to develop a custom font for the project. The resulting typeface system, designed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini together with Andrea Tartarelli and Maria Chiara Fantini as a rework of Francesco Canovaro original Beatrix Antiqua, is a 50-weights ode to the beauty of classical roman letterforms, that pairs elegant alternates and quirky ligatures with an array of design options for clear and effective editorial, signage, logo and wayfinding design. The base display family, Monterchi, allows endless design expressions with a range of six weights from the slender thin to the strong extrabold, all with matching italics and an array of over one hundred discretionary ligatures. A fine-tuned companion Monterchi Text has been developed to excel in body use, with a larger x-height and wider spacing - clear and legible even at small sizes. The use range of the family is enriched by Monterchi Serif and Monterchi Sans that feature different contemporary interpretations of the same classical geometric skeleton, allowing for layered editorial design and variation. All the fifty fonts in the Monterchi Type System feature an extended character set of over 1100 glyphs covering over 200 languages using the Latin alphabet, as well as Greek and Russian Cyrillic. Open Type features include small caps, positional figures, alternate letterforms, stylistic sets and discretionary ligatures. With his elegant, historical aesthetic, Monterchi embodies the spirit of early Renaissance and the humanist obsession with constructed and geometric beauty - still managing to function as a workhorse family, ready to help any designer in need of a timeless classic look, or looking for the right ligature to transform a simple word into a striking wordmark.