Cardinalis Typeface
A text typeface revival.
Background
Cardinalis is a revival text typeface I created during my first term at Type West. It is a revival of the Keystone Type Foundry’s Cardinal Series which was initially developed in the 1890s. Twelve Point Cardinal was publicized in the foundry’s specimen books between 1903 and 1910 before the foundry was ultimately purchased in 1917.
The Process
I found my sources through an online digital archive and was able to get higher resolution scans of the material through the Letterform Archive. During the initial stages of designing, I found it incredibly helpful to enlarge, print out, and trace each character to better see and understand its forms. Then over the following weeks, I went through various iterations of digitized glyphs to reach my current typeface.
Results
Cardinalis expands beyond the basic character set of uppercase, lowercase, and numerals to also include diacritical marks, punctuation, and symbols that were not present in the original sources.
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