Cardamon™ font family


Designed by  Brigitte Schuster
Cardamon: A well-conceived, readily legible antiqua typeface with an historical touch by Brigitte Schuster

Cardamon is the first typeface designed by Brigitte Schuster. Without being overly obtrusive, the font family Cardamon, inspired as it is by historic antiqua typefaces, has a very characteristic voice and will thus add special appeal to your designs.

Several years ago, Brigitte Schuster made the original designs for Cardamon™ while participating in a Master of Design in Type and Media course at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague in the Netherlands. Her own personal interest in typography and type design is something that has only gradually developed over the years in parallel with her work in the field of graphic design, but eventually she decided to create her own typeface. She began looking at historic typefaces from the 16th century by Hendrik van den Keere and Robert Granjon as the basis for the upright variants and turned to look at those by Giovan Francesco Cresci as inspiration for her italic. She took those elements that she particularly liked to provide the foundation for the forms of Cardamon. In addition, she decided to experiment with placing an emphasis on angular outlines in order to increase the legibility of the font in smaller point sizes and its individuality in the larger point sizes. However, as it turned out, she was unable to achieve the desired effect and decided to abandon this approach, although traces of her original concept still survive in the completed font. Before Cardamon was finally ready for release in early 2015, it was subject to various development phases over a longer period of time during which new and, in some cases, very subtle modifications were made to it.

The evidence of the influence of historic Renaissance antiquas is clearly apparent in the forms of Cardamon, and this is combined with calligraphic elements of text written with a broad-nib pen. The latter can be found, for example, in the partially angular forms, the slight inclination of the characters along the direction of movement of writing and the somewhat tapering stems. Schuster has added to the vibrancy of Cardamon by slightly varying the length of the serifs. A large x-height and generous counters ensure that the font is clearly legible even in small point sizes.Uppercase letters that are just shorter than the cap height also contribute to the aesthetic appeal. In German texts that are necessarily rich in capital letters, this feature makes them appear less prominent, facilitating a pleasant reading flow.

The italic of Cardamon has a quite different design that particularly highlights the calligraphic nature of the font. The most evident features of the italic, with its 15° inclination, are the curves that are coupled with or are free of the stems. Cardamon italic thus has the feel of loosely composed handwriting, and appears more as if written with a narrow rather than broad nib. When weighed against these fundamental changes to form, the typical details of an italic, such as the closed rather than open "a", the single story "g" and the added descender on the "f" hardly seem to register.

Cardamon is available in four finely differentiated weights, from Regular to Bold. All weights are accompanied by a corresponding italic and come with small caps, oldstyle and lining figures and many ligatures, some of which are particularly attractive. There is also a range of ornaments.

Cardamon may be a neutral, restrained antiqua font but considered as a whole it has a marked and individual character. Its somewhat angular forms give it a feel of bygone times that perfectly complements the appearance of the carefully designed italic. The well-conceived and readily legible Cardamon is the ideal tool for setting longer texts or creating editorials, for example. At the same time, the clear and characteristic forms of Cardamon also ensure that it cuts a good figure on device screens.

Cardamon Medium Italic

Desktop fonts are designed to be installed on a computer for use with applications. Licensed per user.
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Annual web fonts are licensed for a set number of page views.
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Cardamon


Select technical format and
language support of the font.
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Pro / OT TTF

supports at least

33 languages.















Technical details
OpenType outline flavour:
TTF - TrueType-Outlines
Technical font names:
File name: CardamonPro-MediumItalic.ttf
Windows menu name: Cardamon Pro Medium
PostScript name: , CardamonPro-MediumItalic
PostScript full name: , Cardamon Pro Medium Italic
Catalog number:
168455174
Characters:
672
US$ 49
Add to cart

Features

Languages

Case-Sensitive Forms

Tag: case

Function: Shifts various punctuation marks up to a position that works better with all-capital sequences or sets of lining figures; also changes oldstyle figures to lining figures. By default, glyphs in a text face are designed to work with lowercase characters. Some characters should be shifted vertically to fit the higher visual center of all-capital or lining text. Also, lining figures are the same height (or close to it) as capitals, and fit much better with all-capital text. The user selects a block of text and applies this feature. The dashes, bracketing characters, guillemet quotes and the like shift up to match the capitals, and oldstyle figures change to lining figures.

Denominators

Tag: dnom

Function: Replaces selected figures which follow a slash with denominator figures. In the string 11/17 selected by the user, the application turns the 17 into denominators when the user applies the fraction feature.

Fractions

Tag: frac

Function: Replaces figures separated by a slash with 'common' (diagonal) fractions. The user enters 3/4 in a recipe and gets the threequarters fraction.

Standard Ligatures

Tag: liga

Function: Replaces a sequence of glyphs with a single glyph which is preferred for typographic purposes. This feature covers the ligatures which the designer/manufacturer judges should be used in normal conditions. The glyph for ffl replaces the sequence of glyphs f f l.

Lining Figures

Tag: lnum

Function: This feature changes selected figures from oldstyle to the default lining form. The user invokes this feature in order to get lining figures, which fit better with all-capital text. Various characters designed to be used with figures may also be covered by this feature. In cases where lining figures are the default form, this feature would undo previous substitutions.

Localized Forms

Tag: locl

Function: Many scripts used to write multiple languages over wide geographical areas have developed localized variant forms of specific letters, which are used by individual literary communities. For example, a number of letters in the Bulgarian and Serbian alphabets have forms distinct from their Russian counterparts and from each other. In some cases the localized form differs only subtly from the script 'norm', in others the forms are radically distinct. This feature enables localized forms of glyphs to be substituted for default forms. The user applies this feature to text to enable localized Bulgarian forms of Cyrillic letters; alternatively, the feature might enable localized Russian forms in a Bulgarian manufactured font in which the Bulgarian forms are the default characters.

Numerators

Tag: numr

Function: Replaces selected figures which precede a slash with numerator figures, and replaces the typographic slash with the fraction slash. In the string 11/17 selected by the user, the application turns the 11 into numerators, and the slash into a fraction slash when the user applies the fraction feature.

Old Style Figures

Tag: onum

Function: This feature changes selected figures from the default lining style to oldstyle form. The user invokes this feature to get oldstyle figures, which fit better into the flow of normal upper- and lowercase text. Various characters designed to be used with figures may also have oldstyle versions.

Proportional Figures

Tag: pnum

Function: Replaces figure glyphs set on uniform (tabular) widths with corresponding glyphs set on glyph-specific (proportional) widths. Tabular widths will generally be the default, but this cannot be safely assumed. Of course this feature would not be present in monospaced designs. The user may apply this feature to get even spacing for lining figures used as dates in an all-cap headline.

Scientific Inferiors

Tag: sinf

Function: Replaces lining or oldstyle figures with inferior figures (smaller glyphs which sit lower than the standard baseline, primarily for chemical or mathematical notation). May also replace lowercase characters with alphabetic inferiors. The application can use this feature to automatically access the inferior figures (more legible than scaled figures).

Superscript

Tag: sups

Function: Replaces lining or oldstyle figures with superior figures (primarily for footnote indication), and replaces lowercase letters with superior letters (primarily for abbreviated French titles). The application can use this feature to automatically access the superior figures (more legible than scaled figures) for footnotes, or the user can apply it to Mssr to get the classic form.

Tabular Figures

Tag: tnum

Function: Replaces figure glyphs set on proportional widths with corresponding glyphs set on uniform (tabular) widths. Tabular widths will generally be the default, but this cannot be safely assumed. Of course this feature would not be present in monospaced designs. The user may apply this feature to get oldstyle figures to align vertically in a column.

Small Capitals From Capitals

Tag: c2sc

Function: Small Capitals From Capitals

Small Capitals

Tag: smcp

Function: This feature turns lowercase characters into small capitals. This corresponds to the common SC font layout. It is generally used for display lines set in Large & small caps, such as titles. Forms related to small capitals, such as oldstyle figures, may be included. The user enters text as mixed capitals and lowercase, and gets Large & small cap text.

Ornaments

Tag: ornm

Function: This is a dual-function feature, which uses two input methods to give the user access to ornament glyphs (e.g. fleurons, dingbats and border elements) in the font. One method replaces the bullet character with a selection from the full set of available ornaments; the other replaces specific "lower ASCII" characters with ornaments assigned to them. The first approach supports the general or browsing user; the second supports the power user. The user inputs qwwwwwwwwwe to form the top of a flourished box in Adobe Caslon, or inputs the bullet character, then chooses the thistle dingbat.

Discretionary Ligatures

Tag: dlig

Function: Replaces a sequence of glyphs with a single glyph which is preferred for typographic purposes. This feature covers those ligatures which may be used for special effect, at the user's preference. The glyph for ct replaces the sequence of glyphs c t, or U+322E (Kanji ligature for "Friday") replaces the sequence U+91D1 U+66DC U+65E5.

Capital Spacing

Tag: cpsp

Function: Globally adjusts inter-glyph spacing for all-capital text. Most typefaces contain capitals and lowercase characters, and the capitals are positioned to work with the lowercase. When capitals are used for words, they need more space between them for legibility and esthetics. This feature would not apply to monospaced designs. Of course the user may want to override this behavior in order to do more pronounced letterspacing for esthetic reasons. The user sets a title in all caps, and the Capital Spacing feature opens the spacing.

Kerning

Tag: kern

Function: Adjusts amount of space between glyphs, generally to provide optically consistent spacing between glyphs. Although a well-designed typeface has consistent inter-glyph spacing overall, some glyph combinations require adjustment for improved legibility. Besides standard adjustment in the horizontal direction, this feature can supply size-dependent kerning data via device tables, "cross-stream" kerning in the Y text direction, and adjustment of glyph placement independent of the advance adjustment. Note that this feature may apply to runs of more than two glyphs, and would not be used in monospaced fonts. Also note that this feature does not apply to text set vertically. The o is shifted closer to the T in the combination "To."

These fonts support the Basic Latin character set. Each font is Unicode™ encoded, and available in d

Tag: Basic Latin

Function: These fonts support the Basic Latin character set. Each font is Unicode™ encoded, and available in different formats. Please review the product information for each font to ensure it will meet your requirements.

These fonts support the Latin Extended character set. Each font is Unicode™ encoded, and available i

Tag: Latin Extended

Function: These fonts support the Latin Extended character set. Each font is Unicode™ encoded, and available in different formats. Please review the product information for each font to ensure it will meet your requirements.