Following the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, Poster Jam’s monthly challenge featuring the word “Home” took on new dimensions. This poster was widely circulated on the web and submitted to various Covid-related design initiatives around the world.

The light blue colour marks a health and hygiene emergency by closely relating to the colour used for water, sterilisation and hygiene representations. The poster’s visual impact is subtle while eliciting reliability, acceptance and safety to the viewer. For conveying the message, the widely recognisable font Helvetica is applied on a large scale. Its use relates to the simplicity of the instruction, communicated on a global level, calling for vigilance and adherence.

The illustration of crossed arms, found in the letter B of Typefesse Pleine, represents the body part that should be thoroughly disinfected according to state instructions. The gesture of crossing arms can be seen as defensive body language while the form of the letter is reminiscent of a house roof or a bird’s wings, both referencing the notion of safety.

Vercetti is a sans serif font inspired by a humanistic design with a geometric touch. Its character structure is solid and moderately conventional, integrating smoothly into miscellaneous projects such as editorial design, branding, or advertising. It is also perfectly suitable for letterheads, website design, packaging, posters, and short texts.

Vercetti's overall look is quite rectangular while preserving balanced proportions. These characteristics increase font legibility when being used in smaller sizes. Discrete ink traps contribute to the clarity and readability of the glyphs, even in narrow blocks of text.

With a total of 326 glyphs, Vercetti is provisioned with a set of OpenType features, including automatic contextual alternates, case alternates, tabular figures, and standard ligatures, alongside symbols, arrows, and circled numbers.

In April 2021, the initial discussion arose that led to the design of the Vercetti font. Despite the fact that Filippos and Richard were located on different continents, they regularly communicated and exchanged ideas and thoughts regarding the progress and development of the font. They also received decisive guidance and feedback from experienced type designers.

This font also materializes various musings on the obsolete freeware scattered around the internet. Old, outdated, or incomplete digital fonts can be revived and updated, made applicable again, and put into a new context, thus immediately starting to serve new purposes. While designing Vercetti, the creators pulled out and reassembled pieces from an earlier release, so Vercetti became a decisively enhanced descendant of Magenta Ltd's MgOpen Moderna open source typeface.

Filippos Fragkogiannis introduced most facets of Vercetti's concept, while Richard Mandona carried out the entire font design under assignment. All details were carefully drawn and corrected with a fine finish in mind and with Vercetti as an efficient good, directly accessed by the creative community and the general public.

As a result, the Vercetti font aspires to be another consistent and well-polished option in the font book of any proficient designer, student, or individual; hence, it is distributed as a free font under Licence Amicale. We are keen to see Vercetti's visual simplicity used across various mediums.

Special thanks to Valerio Monopoli (Morula Type), Christian Gruber, David Súid (W Type Foundry), Adrien Midzic (Pizza Typefaces), and Matthieu Salvaggio (Blaze Type) for their gracious support and contribution to this project.