Earlier this year, Debora Manetti, of Zetafonts Type Foundry, based in Florence – Italy, contacted Petrescu Press for a collaboration in a wood type manufacturing project, for several fonts. Zetafonts is famous for creating the Fontmood platform, which hosts and promotes the work of type designers around the world, with a collection of over 7,000 free and commercial fonts.

The first font to be manufactured as wood type is Stinger, created by the design team of Maria Chiara Fantini, Andrea Tartarelli and Francesco Canovaro, coordinated by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini.

Stinger Typeface is a complex project that contains a family of 40 fonts, with different writing systems, extended Latin and Russian Cyrillic characters, covering over 200 languages.

Stinger style falls into the Reverse Contrast Typefaces category, defined by William Caslon & Catherwood, in type specimen books, from 1821.

Stinger Typeface is an Italian sans serif grotesque, with modernist squarish interventions, and calligraphic details.

The round shapes look like a flowing river that meandered gently through a meadow.

While, at antipodes, the juxtaposition of thin horizontals and thick verticals, creates a contradictory effect.

Features also found in Aldo Novarese’s letter Design Philosophy.

The font version produced into wood type is Stinger Bold (Fit) at the 16 cicero size, italian type height.