Cardinal
Styles
Fast driving by Jack, with the zippy Mazda, quickly excels on the rugged course.
Buy from €70Cardinal Classic Short Regular
Fast driving by Jack, with the zippy Mazda, quickly excels on the rugged course.
Buy from €70Cardinal Classic Short Italic
Fast driving by Jack, with the zippy Mazda, quickly excels on the rugged course.
Buy from €70Cardinal Classic Short Medium
Fast driving by Jack, with the zippy Mazda, quickly excels on the rugged course.
Buy from €70Cardinal Classic Short Medium Italic
Fast driving by Jack, with the zippy Mazda, quickly excels on the rugged course.
Buy from €70Cardinal Classic Short SemiBold
Fast driving by Jack, with the zippy Mazda, quickly excels on the rugged course.
Buy from €70Cardinal Classic Short SemiBold Italic
Fast driving by Jack, with the zippy Mazda, quickly excels on the rugged course.
Buy from €70Cardinal Classic Short Bold
Fast driving by Jack, with the zippy Mazda, quickly excels on the rugged course.
Buy from €70Cardinal Classic Short Bold Italic
Cardinal In Use
- Trax is France’s leading magazine and website for electronic music and culture. Founded in Paris in 1997, Trax was historically intermingled with its subject (from the early days of the “French Touch” to later major acts), witnessing, recording, and surviving the dramatic changes of the music industry and the rise of electronic culture. In 2013, the magazine was eventually bought by its own employees. Trax turned 18 in 2015 and decided to reflect these changes with a new format.Production Type’s Jean-Baptiste Levée, in collaboration with Large design studio, rethought the new Trax from the ground up. Starting from a new magazine format and art direction, and a new logo drawn by Levée (based on Stunt Nord, a standalone style of the Stunt family, to be released), the overhaul extended beyond the magazine to all aspects of the Trax brand, such as the website, events, and digital products.The type palette provided by Production Type is a compound of existing off-the-shelf types, new extensions, and previously unseen designs. The main text typeface is Cardinal, a serifed alphabet drawn by Yoann Minet & Quentin Schmerber under Levée’s guidance. Cardinal refers to many classic Jannon-inspired typefaces that were popular in 1990s digital culture, and distantly echoes the ill-fated typeface ITC Garamond. In this way, Cardinal Photo and Cardinal Fruit are two extra sidekicks, reminiscent of an era where the early photocomposition faces were swapped with their electronic counterparts. Stratos, Minet’s own design, while being unreleased at the time, was featured in the layout since the first issue redesigned by the team. Minotaur Lombardic & Proto Slab debuted on the cover of Trax magazine (respectively on issues 185 & 190), too. Existing designs from the Production Type catalog were also put to use across all Trax channels: Minotaur, Minotaur Sans, Minotaur Beef, Countach, and Proto Grotesk, which gained newly drawn weights specifically for the brand.Read more about the project on It’s Nice That and see more pictures on Large website.
Cardinal Classic Long Bold + Stratos Black + Proto Grotesk Bold + Proto Slab Bold + Countach Bold + Minotaur Lombardic Bold + Minotaur Beef Bold + Minotaur Sans Bold + Minotaur Beef Bold
Trax magazine - Beacon – Gravity Pairs album art
Beacon’s third full-length record enters sight as a work of meticulous revision and refraction. Returning home to New York in 2016, four years and several tours since the duo's first release with Ghostly International, Thomas Mullarney III and Jacob Gossett knew the next direction would be different. Together they embarked on open-ended sessions, adopting a more linear style of songwriting compared to their previous loop and texture-driven method. They fundamentally constructed demos from piano chords and guitar phrases with vocal melodies, editing iterations almost ad infinitum, looking through each from a multitude of angles. Compositions expanded, while others pared back to where they began. Like the bending of light, this abstractive and patient process outlines a space and scale in which seemingly separate colors — minimalist ballads, elaborate pop spirituals, and four-on-the-floor dance sequences — can coexist at different speeds, fanning out with spectral cohesion. A prismatic collection Beacon call Gravity Pairs. [Ghostly]
Justin Sloane designed the whole album layout, merchandising and tour poster with two styles of Cardinal Classic Mid.
Information
Design
Jean-Baptiste Levée
Team
Yoann Minet
Quentin Schmerber
Hugues Gentile
Dorine Sauzet
Suehli Tan
Igino Marini
Arthur Schwarz
Version
1.004About this font
Synthetic organisms look human, yet are made of artificial materials. Cardinal is the equivalent of the androïd characters called “synthetics”, which were developed in the movie series Alien. Synthetics entertain a close relationship with the living world and have a troubling resemblance with the models they imitate — humans. Androïds do not emit heat, smell or pheromones, and their synthetic origin is thus hard to detect. Cardinal is an exploration of that idea in type design. It navigates between the organicity of classic text typefaces and the plasticity of contemporary digital type. It has some traits of designs by Garamont and Granjon but bears its own dryness and rigidity. Reminiscent of an era of “old digital typefaces”, Cardinal evokes the early computing days. Synthetics do not die, they are just sometimes deactivated.
The Cardinal system is developed in three distinct directions. First, the core styles are Cardinal Classic Short, Mid, and Long, which have three x-heights that can be adjusted depending on body copy point size and line length. We recommend using Cardinal Classic Long for titles and subheads or brief paragraphs of text. Cardinal Classic Mid fits standard body text sizes, and Cardinal Classic Short works well at small sizes. Second, Cardinal Fruit is a very specific flavor of condensed, recalling early computer advertisements. Its Italics are particularly sharp and will convey a sense of liveliness and accuracy.
Designed for large, bold headlines, Cardinal Photo is a member of the Cardinal Collection. It is derived from the Cardinal Classic Mid series, only with more dramatic contrast, and tight, oh-so-tight spacing.
The idea behind Cardinal Photo sprung from photojournalism magazines and their typography, where headlines splash all over the page, with shallow linespacing. High contrast images and high contrast type were MFEO (made for each other.) Cardinal Photo is a natural matchmaker, referencing phototypesetting just like its sibling, Cardinal Fruit, references 80s typography. “Photo”—as in photojournalism and phototypesetting—are both concepts that translate well to digital design, where long headlines are consumed in big bites.
Why wouldn’t someone just tighten the spacing manually? Well, Cardinal has this TNT (tight but not touching) idea built-in, where the shapes closing in are meticulously placed, and already kerned for you, giving you all the credit for that tight-tight-tight design—achieving compactness without crude compression, that typographical equivalent of a car crash. Cardinal is tight so that you can stay creatively loose. Headlines, slogans, eye-catching clickbait: you name it. Cardinal is here for big things.
Formats
Static (OTF, TTF, WOFF, WOFF2)About the designers
Jean-Baptiste Levée is a type designer with a strong focus on corporate and bespoke typefaces.
Jean-Baptiste Levée
CEO, founder
Jean-Baptiste Levée (1981) has designed over a hundred typefaces for industry, moving pictures, fashion and media. He is the founder of the independent foundry Production Type.