Types of Venice
ABOUT THE PROJECT
The city of Venice is famous for its role in publishing and print design. Here, Aldus Manutius and other innovative publishers developed new type formats, easy-to-read visual culture, the Italic style, the semi-colon, and the “pocket-sized” book.
But Venice had hosted more than 400 years of type design before the advent of movable type. In churches and mosaics, in monuments and inscriptions, one can find these gorgeous expressions of Byzantine, Gothic, and Medieval letterforms.
In 2024, Zack McCune traveled to Venice to document and digitize some of these extraordinary letterforms. They are collected here as “TYPES OF VENICE”. Many of the .ttf files contain only uppercase lettering and lack numbers or punctuation. This reflects the source materials. Occassionally, missing letterforms (like “K”) were created and added in order to make the sets work for modern English writing, dependent on the full 26-letters of the Roman alphabet.
Each type is offered as a free-to-use, free-to-modify, and free-to-share digital typefaces. These are meant to be used and improved. They are the reflections of hundreds of years of public type, a common creativity, that shaped knowledge in one of the world’s most extraordinary cities.
ABOUT ZACK McCUNE
Zack McCune studied Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Now a practicing graphic designer and filmmaker, he continues to study how visual media shapes culture.
His creative work has been featured by AeroMexico, the National Parks Service, the BBC, France 3, and the International Ocean Film Festival. Through 2024, he has screened films in 31 festivals across 19 countries.
In his professional life, Zack works to grow awareness, usage, and love for Wikipedia as Director of Brand at the Wikimedia Foundation. He is a champion for public art and the use of shared creativity to enrich public life. Zack believes everyone is an artist.