TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Fri Oct 4 17:49:24 EDT 2024

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ABOUT

Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini

Born in Firenze in 1969. Cofounder with Francesco Canovaro and Debora Manetti of the Italian design firm in Firenze called Studio Kmzero. He co-designed some typefaces there such as Arsenale White (2009). In 2002, Pancini developed Targa, TargaMS and TargaMSHand (for comic books?), basing his design on the peculiar sans serif monospace typeface with slightly rounded corners and a geometric, condensed skeleton that Italy had been using for its license plates. In 2022, Francesco Canovaro redesigned this font into a versatile multi-weight typeface, Targa Pro, which includes Targa Pro Mono (which keeps the original monospace widths), Targa Pro Roman (with proportional widths), both in five weights plus italics, the handmade version Targa Hand, and Targa Pro Stencil.

The handwriting of Lord Byron led Pancini to develop the brush script typeface Byron (2013, Zetafonts).

MyFonts credits him with the rounded avant garde sans family Antipasto (2007), but elswhere we read that this typeface is made by Matteo di Iorio, so there is some confusion. It was extended in 2017 by Pancini as Antipasto Pro.

In 2014, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Francesco Canovaro co-designed Amazing Grotesk (+Ultra). He also designed the calm bold geometric rounded sans typeface Cocogoose (2014; replaced by Cocogoose Pro in 2017) and the stylish deco font Offensive Behaviour. Cocogoose Letterpress is free. Cocogoose is part of the Coco Gothic family, a collection of twelve typefaces each inspired by the fashion mood of every decade of last century, named after fashion icon Coco Chanel. Cocogoose is Coco Gothic for the 1940s. See also Coco Gothic Pro (2021).

In 2015, Pancini published the grand family Coco Gothic. This Latin / Greek / Cyrillic typeface family features a small x-height and sligghtly rounded corners to make the avant garde and geometric sans typefaces in vogue in the 1970s come alive again, ready for 21st century fashion magazines. It comes with substyles that recreate many moods, including art nouveau and arts and crafts (Cocotte), Italian propaganda style and Italian deco (Cocosignum), hipster style (CocoBikeR), or Bauhaus (Cocomat). Coco Gothic was initially developed as a corporate font for Lucca Comics & Games Festival 2013. The rounded geometric sans family Cocomat (by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Deborah Manetti and Francesco Canovaro) was inspired by the style of the twenties and the visions of Italian futurists like Fortunato Depero, Giacomo Balla and Antonio Sant'Elia. Updated in 2019 as Cocomat Pro.

Still in 2015, Cosimo and Zetafonts published the connected creamy baseball script Bulletto, the grungy handvetica Neue, and the calligraphic wedding typeface Hello Script. In 2015, at Zetafonts, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini designed CocoBikeR (2015) to celebrate the hipster and bike cultures. CocoBikeR (for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic) is part of the successful Coco Gothic typeface family. In 2017, Pancini designed the 1930s Italian art deco typeface families Cocosignum Maiuscoletto and Cocosignum Corsivo Italico. In 2021, he published the 48-style (+variable) font family Coco Gothic Pro. This is a redrawn and expanded set of fonts: Inspired by a biography of Coco Chanel and trying to capture the quintessential mood of classical fashion elegance, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini designed Coco Gothic looking for the effect that the first geometric sans typefaces (like Futura, Kabel or the italian eponyms like Semplicita) had when printed on paper. The crisp modernist shapes acquired in printing charme and warmth through a slight rounding of the corners that is translated digitally in the design of Coco Gothic. [...] A distinguishing feature of Coco Gothic Pro is the inclusion of ten alternate historical sets that allow you to use the typeface as a true typographic time machine, selecting period letterforms that range from art deco and nouveau, to modernism and to eighties' minimalism. Equipped with such an array of historical variants, Coco Gothic Pro becomes an encyclopedia of styles from the last century. There is also attention to Darkmode and there is coverage of Cyrillic and Greek.

Typefaces from 2016: Adlery (a curly brush script), Kitten (Fat, Swash, Swash Monoline, Slant, Bold: signage script family), Adlibitum (a blackletter typeface by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Francesco Canovaro), Morbodoni (a display didone by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Francesco Canovaro).

In 2016, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Andrea Tartarelli, Giulia Ursenna Dorati and Andrea Gaspari co-designed the 1940s vintage brush script typeface Banana Yeti, which is based on an example by Ross George shown in George's Speedball 1947 Textbook Manual. The Zetafonts team extended the original design to six styles and multilingual coverage. The ExtraBold is free. Still in 2016, Pancini designed Calligraphunk, an experimental typeface that mimicks polyrythmic calligraphy, by alternating two sets of lowercase letters to emulate handwriting.

In 2016, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Matteo Chiti, Luca Chiti and Andrea Tartarelli co-designed the retro connected brush script font family Advertising Script, which is based on an example from Ross George's Speedball 1947 Textbook Manual.

Beatrix Antiqua (2016, by Francesco Canovaro, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli). This humanist sans-serif typeface is part of the Beatrix family (Beatrix Nova, etc.) that takes its inspiration from the classic Roman monumental capital model. Its capitals are directly derived from the stone carvings in Florence's Santa Croce Cathedral. Beatrix keeps a subtle lapidary swelling at the terminals suggesting a glyphic serif, similar to Hermann Zapf's treatment in Optima.

Amazing Grotesk (2016) is based on a logo designed by Francesco Canovaro.

Studio Gothic (2017, by Francesco Canovaro, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli) is an 8-style geometric sans family based on Alessandro Butti's geometric sans classic, Semplicita.

Hello Script and Hello Sans can be used for layering and coloring. The Christmas-themed version is Hello Christmas.

Pancini designed the 64-strong typeface family Body Grotesque and Body Text in 2017-2018, together with Andrea Tartarelli. It was conceived as a contemporary alternative to modernist super-families like Univers or Helvetica.

In 2017, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli co-designed the sans typeface family Kabrio, which gives users four different corner treatment options.

Anaphora (2018). Anaphora is a contemporary serif typeface designed by Francesco Canovaro (roman), Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini (italic) and Andrea Tartarelli. It features a wedge serif design with nine weights from thin to heavy. Its wide counters and low x-height make it pleasant and readable at text sizes while the uncommon shapes make it strong and recognizable when used in display size. Anaphora covers Latin, Greek and Cyrillic.

Canovaro's Arista served as a basis for the 29-style monolinear rounded sans typeface family Aristotelica (2018) by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli. See also Aristotelica Pro (2020).

In 2018, he designed the italics for Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini's Domotika typeface family. Between 2018 and 2021, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli developed the 8-weight humanist sans typeface Domotika for Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, further into the 18-style Domotika Pro (2021).

In 2018, he published Radcliffe, with Andrea Tartarelli, a Clarendon revival with Text and Casual subfamilies. Radcliffe (a Clarendon revival by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli), and added the layerable condensed Cocogoose Narrows to the Cocogoose family. Codec (2018) by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Francesco Canovaro and Andrea Tartarelli is a geometric sans typeface family in which all terminal cuts are horiontal or vertical. See also Codec Pro (2019).

His Double Bass (2018) is a jazzy 4-style typeface family that pays tribute to Saul Bass's iconic hand lettering for Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm film title sequence and other movies, Bass's vibrating, almost brutal cut-out aestethics, and the cartoonish lettering and jazzy graphics of the fifties.

In 2018, he published the sharp wedge serif typeface Blacker to pay homage to the 1970s. In 2019, that was followed by Blacker Pro (Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli, who write: Blacker Pro is the revised and extended version of the original wedge serif type family designed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli in 2017. Blacker was developed as a take on the style that Jeremiah Shoaf has defined as the "evil serif" genre: typefaces with high contrast, oldstyle or modern serif proportions and sharp, blade-like triangular serifs). Still in 2018, he designed the swooping polyrhythmic calligraphic typeface Calligraphunk.

In 2018, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli designed Holden, a very Latin cursive sans typeface with pointed brush aesthetics and fluid rhythmic lines.

In 2019, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Francesco Canovaro and Andrea Tartarelli published the monolinear geometric rounded corner amputated "e" sans typeface family Cocogoose Classic, the sans family Aquawax Pro, and the condensed rounded monoline techno sans typeface family Iconic.

In 2019, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Andrea Tartarelli and Maria Chiara Fantini at Zetafonts published a slightly calligraphic Elzevir typeface, Lovelace.

In 2019, the lapidary typeface family Beatrix Antiqua (Francesco Canovaro) was reworked by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini together with Andrea Tartarelli and Maria Chiara Fantini into a 50-style type system called Monterchi that includes Text, Serif and Sans subfamilies. Monterchi is a custom font for an identity project for a famous fresco in Monterchi, developed under the art directorship of Riccardo Falcinelli.

Tarif (2019) is a typeface family inspired by the multicultural utopia of convivencia---the peaceful coexistence of Muslims, Christians and Jews in tenth century Andalusia that played an important role in bringing to Europe the classics of Greek philosophy, together with Muslim culture and aesthetics. It is a slab serif typeface with a humanist skeleton and inverted contrast, subtly mixing Latin zest, calligraphic details, extreme inktraps, and postmodern unorthodox reinvention of traditional grotesque letter shapes. The exuberant design, perfect for titling, logo and display use, is complemented by a wide range of seven weights allowing for solid editorial use and great readability in body text. Matching italics have been designed with the help of Maria Chiara Fantini and Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, while Rania Azmi has collaborated on the design of the arabic version of Tarif, where the humanist shapes and inverted contrast of the Latin letters find a natural connection with modern arabic letterforms.

Late in 2019, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini released the fun typeface family Hagrid at Zetafonts, which writes: Crypto-typography---the passion for unknown, weird and unusual character shapes---is a disease commonly affecting type designers. Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini has celebrated it in this typeface family, aptly named Hagrid after the half-blood giant with a passion for cryptozoology described by R. K. Rowling in her Harry Potter books. Extreme optical corrections, calligraphic counter-spaces, inverted contrast, over-the-top overshoots: all the inventions that abound in vernacular and experimental typography have been lovingly collected in this mongrel sans serif family, carefully balancing quirky solutions and solid grotesque design.

In 2020, Pancini released Stinger (2020, a 42-style reverse contrast family by Francesco Canovaro, Cosimo Pancini, Andrea Tartarelli and Maria Chiara Fantini) and Boring Sans (a typeface family designed along two variable axis: weight and weirdness). As part of the free font set Quarantype (2020), Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini designed Quarantype Embrace, Quarantype Hangout, Quarantype Hopscotch, Quarantype Joyride, Quarantype Sackrace, and Quarantype Uplift (with Maria Chiara Fantini).

In 2020, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Mario De Libero revived Nebiolo's Carioli (1928) as Cairoli Classic and Cairoli Now at Italian Type / Zetafonts. They extended the original weight and width range and developing both a faithful Classic version and a Now variant. The Cairoli Classic family keeps the original low x-height range, very display-oriented, and normalizes the design while emphasizing the original peculiarities like the hook cuts in curved letters, the high-waisted uppercase R and the squared ovals of the letterforms. Cairoli Now is developed with an higher x-height, more suited for text and digital use, and adds to the original design deeper inktraps and round punctuation, while slightly correcting the curves for a more contemporary look. Cairoli Variable has a weight and width axis.

In 2020, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Mariachiara Fantini---with the help of Solenn Bordeau---released Erotique at Zetafonts. Erotique evolved from Lovelace, an earlier Zetafonts typeface. Zetafonts describe this evil serif as follows: it challenges its romantic curves with the glitchy and fluid aestethic of transmodern neo-brutalist typography. Late in 2020, they added Erotique Sans, the sans version of Erotique, also designed by Cosimo Pancini and Maria Chiara Fantini.

Late in 2020, he co-designed the 46-style font family Eastman Grotesque together with Francesco Canovaro and Andrea Tartarelli. This monolinear sans with a tall x-height comprises an interesting Eastman Grotesque Alternate subfamily with daring and in-your-face glyphs. The typeface evolved from Zetafonts' earlier Bauhaus-inspired typeface Eastman (2020). Later fonts in this family include Eastman Condensed (2021, by Francesco Canovaro, Cosimo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli).

In 2020, Cosimo Pancini, Andrea Tartarelli and Mario De Libero drew the 60-style Cocogoose Pro Narrows family, which features many compressed typefaces as well as grungy letterpress versions.

Sunshine Pro (2020, Zetafonts) was designed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Solenn Bordeau expanding the original Sunshine design by Francesco Canovaro, part of the Quarantype collection (2020), which in turn was designed as a typeface for good vibes against Covid-19. Sunshine Pro is an experimental Clarendon-style font with variable contrast along the weight axis---contrast is reversed in light weight, minimized in the regular weight and peaks in the bold and heavy weights.

Coco Sharp (2021) is a 62-style sans feast, with two variable fonts with variable x-height, by Francesco Canovaro, Cosimo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli.

Co-designer of Heading Now (2021), a 160-strong titling font (+2 variable fonts) by Francesco Canovaro, Cosimo Pancini, Andrea Tartarelli and Mario De Libero that provides an enormous range of widths.

Keratine (2021, Cosimo Pancini, Andrea Tartarelli and Mario De Libero). A German expressionist typeface that exists in a space between these two traditions, mixing the proportions of humanistic typefaces with the strong slabs and fractured handwriting of blackletter calligraphy. Pancini, its main designer, writes that it explores the impossible territory between antiqua and blackletter.

Geppetto (2021) is a frivolous Tuscan font that started out as a revival of a condensed Tuscan wood type family appearing in the 1903 Tubbs Wood Type catalog and which was probably derived from an 1859 typeface by William Hamilton Page. Pancini built a variable font on top of it and calls it a font for fake news.

In 2021, Pancini added Coco Tardis as a variable font with a time travel slider to the Coco Gothic family.

Millard Grotesque (2021) is a true "grot" in the Akzidenz Grotesque sense of the word. This typeface family was designed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli.

Pancini's Descript (2021) is a variable script font with two axes, slant and speed of writing.

Milligram (2021) is a very tightly set grot by Cosimo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini
 [Designer info]
Dafont page
Klingspor Museum page
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INTERNAL LINKS
Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type design in Italy ⦿ Children's handwriting fonts ⦿ Map/Travel dingbats ⦿ Comic/cartoon fonts ⦿ Monospaced fonts ⦿ Handwriting fonts ⦿ Brush script typefaces ⦿ Avant Garde typefaces ⦿ Sites with only a few free fonts ⦿ Fashion mag typefaces ⦿ Art Nouveau typefaces ⦿ Arts and Crafts Movement ⦿ Art deco typefaces ⦿ Bauhaus and type design ⦿ Letterpress ⦿ Futurism ⦿ Greek/Coptic ⦿ Cyrillic type design ⦿ Calligraphic typefaces ⦿ Modern style [Bodoni, Didot, Walbaum, Thorowgood, Computer Modern, etc.] ⦿ Blackletter fonts ⦿ Signage typefaces ⦿ Lapidary typefaces ⦿ Arts and Crafts Movement ⦿ Curly typefaces ⦿ Christmas / Season's Fonts ⦿ Multicolor typefaces ⦿ Cutout or paper-cut typefaces ⦿ Clarendon ⦿ Hipster fonts ⦿ Elzevir ⦿ Lapidary typefaces ⦿ Variable fonts ⦿ Typefaces related to German expressionism ⦿ Wood Type ⦿ Akzidenz Grotesk ⦿