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.

Loaded with personality and functionality, Cresta is built to look good while surviving the worst conditions. It is at home on screen and in a magazine. Its six weights are intended to be used everywhere. Unlike most typefaces, Cresta was built without a reference. For this project, everything design choice was based on what worked best for a workhorse sans serif family. Cresta was originally created as the primary typeface for this website. This meant it needed to work in copy, headlines, and navigation across all devices, browsers and operating systems. This meant it needed to be sturdy and have enough character to make it stand out from other UI typefaces. With its large x-height, ample counters, and giant apertures, Cresta is meant for easy utility in rough conditions. Even with all of this, that doesnít mean that its dull; as the weights increase, the style of Cresta becomes more appearant. This style is defined most apparently by the terminals on the lowercase r and the angle of the joins between the curved and straight strokes (such as in the connection on the n).

Jeko is an exciting geometric typeface with contemporary touches. It’s born from strong elementary shapes, with clean circles interwoven with modern cuts and sharp edges. It has a distinctive voice, retaining the simplicity and elegance of classic geometric typefaces with a fresh, stylish rework. It's bold in personality and fills the space without shouting, appearing refined and confident. It’s high X-height and strong capitals sustain a large amount of visibility across all weights, and have been optically corrected for even better legibility. It has been designed as a variable font to give lots of options and access to unique type looks; however it also includes nine weights to give just as much access to creativity to those without access to variable supporting software. Aventa’s matching italics sloped at a lively 11º help give it a full range of expressions. Its distinctive character and many variables make it a versatile, stylish workhorse, great for interfaces and design. Jeko is a re-designed form of the Aventa Typeface. Each font contains just over 570 glyphs with full Western, Central, Eastern European and Cyrillic language support. Check out Larken which is a great pair for Jeko.

Horseface is a chic geometric typeface with Didonian roots and a penchant for high fashion. Its mono-linear, formulaic structure is elongated with a generous x-height giving it an upmarket but approachable look, traditional forms remixed with a modern twist. Fundamentally a display typeface, Horseface is best set at large sizes. Because of it's thin line weight it is advised to expand paths after typing. It is available in six different styles and comes in OpenType (.otf) format for Mac and Windows. Features: Horseface Supports the following OpenType features: Standard ligatures, discretionary ligatures, ordinals, custom fractions, denominators, numerators, small caps, superscript, scientific inferiors, proportional and tabular oldstyle and lining figures, and a slashed zero. There are also three stylistic sets containing alternate glyphs. Supported Languages: Each weight has a 665 glyph character set for use in the following Latin languages: Albanian, Afrikaans, Basque, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Gaelic, German, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Maltese, Norwegian, Occitan, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Sami, Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovene, Sorbian, Spanish, Swedish, Swahili, Turkish, Walloon and Welsh.

Made up of sixteen individual weights and spread over three different optical sizes, Essonnes is designed to bring utility back to the Didot genre. It’s a common belief among designers that Didones don’t work for text. This wasn’t true in 1819 and it isn’t true today. Like its forbearers, Essonnes is a truly optical family—not just a study in adjusting contrast. The text and display weights have been designed from the ground up for their intended roles. This means that everything from the height of the uppercase & lowercase letters have been specifically tuned for their intended purpose. Like many typefaces, Essonnes started after falling in love with a piece of history. In this case, it was the eccentric forms of Pierre Didot’s Type and the evolution of the High contrast Didone throughout the 19th century. It was out of curiosity and love for these forms that led to the first draft of what would become Essonnes back in 2011. These unique situations—screens, modern printing methods, the previous 200 years of typographic innovation since the original design, my own life experiences—have led to a typeface that, while based on history, is not stuck in it.