Designers: Francesco
Canovaro,
Cosimo
Lorenzo
Pancini,
Andrea
Tartarelli,
Maria
Chiara
FantiniIn 1459, while visiting his passing away mom, italian painter Piero della Francesca spent seven days developing a fresco of a pregnant madonna in a little country church in the hilltown of Monterchi (Italy). Hailed today as one of the masterpieces of Italian Renaissance, the fresco was given a brand-new branding in 2019 by Art Director Riccardo Falcinelli who asked the Zetafonts team to develop a custom-made typeface for the project.
The resulting typeface system, developed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini together with Andrea Tartarelli and Maria Chiara Fantini as a rework of Francesco Canovaro initial Beatrix Antiqua, is a 50-weights ode to the appeal of classical roman letterforms, that sets stylish alternates and quirky ligatures with an array of design options for clear and effective editorial, signs, logo and wayfinding design.
The base display screen household, Monterchi, enables limitless design expressions with a series of six weights from the slender thin to the strong extrabold, all with matching italics and a selection of over one hundred discretionary ligatures. A fine-tuned buddy Monterchi Text has been established to master body use, with a bigger x-height and larger spacing - clear and understandable even at small sizes.
The use series of the family is improved by Monterchi Serif and Monterchi Sans that feature various modern interpretations of the very same classical geometric skeleton, enabling for layered editorial design and variation. All the fifty typefaces in the Monterchi Type System include 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 functions include little caps, positional figures, alternate letterforms, stylistic sets and discretionary ligatures.
With his stylish, historic visual, Monterchi embodies the spirit of early Renaissance and the humanist obsession with constructed and geometric beauty - still managing to work as a workhorse household, all set to assist any designer in need of a timeless traditional appearance, or trying to find the right ligature to change a simple word into a striking wordmark.
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