Font Engineering for ZDF Corporate Typeface

116 fonts engineered for broadcast, web, subtitles, and accessibility

Berlin studio bBox Type (Anja Meiners and Ralph du Carrois) completely redesigned the ZDF corporate typeface in 2020–2021, guided by a brief to improve legibility and flexibility without leaving the established type genre. The result is a 116-font superfamily spanning three optical sizes (ZDF Micro, ZDF Type, ZDF Design), three widths, and corresponding italics. Fontwerk handled all font production and mastering, delivering the family in TrueType, OpenType, and web formats; by summer 2021 many ZDF channels had been converted to the new typeface.

Set in ZDF Type, ZDF Micro, ZDF Design

Insights

ZDF Micro and ZDF Type are uniwidth designs: stroke width grows inward so spacing and line breaks remain constant across weights.
Fontwerk applied manual TrueType hinting to the entire family, optimising screen rendering for both modern OSes and the Windows XP ClearType rasterizer—going beyond standard automatic hinting.
The superfamily was delivered as eight Glyphs files; Fontwerk engineers tested each, then coordinated corrections with the designers before finalising font metrics and name entries.
Special integration work was done for the Vizrt broadcast graphics environment, enabling ZDF to use its own fonts for on-air templates, archived content, and social media distribution.