For many years license plates in Italy have been using a quite peculiar sans serif monospace typeface with slightly rounded corners and a geometric, condensed skeleton. These letterforms have been used by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini as an inspiration for Targa, published as the first-ever Zetafonts typeface in 2003. Almost twenty years later, Francesco Canovaro has brought the project under scrutiny for a complete redesign, keeping its inventions, solving its issues, and making it into a versatile multi-weight typeface.
The original type family has been developed in two subfamilies: Targa Pro Mono (which keeps the original monospace widths) and Targa Pro Roman (with proportional widths), both in five weights plus italics. The original family also included the handmade version Targa Hand which has been paired with a new Targa Pro Stencil to allow for more versatility and choice for display use.
All weights of Targa Pro feature an extended latin character set covering over 200 languages, as well as a full set of Open Type features including positional numbers, alternates and stylistic sets.
Halfway between postmodern appropriation of utilitarian design and rationalist design, Targa Pro sits comfortably at the crossroads between artificial nostalgia and modernist functionality, ready to surprise the user with its versatility and quirky Italian flavour.
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