Cordoba
Cordoba Regular
Cordoba Fill
Typography is the design and arrangement of the simple graphic glyphs that embody language. A typeface conveys tone and emotion, often before a single word is read. Each character is shaped by centuries of use, misuse, and reinvention; these glyphs aren’t static, they mutate to reflect shifts in culture and technology. Type carries the fossil imprints of its evolution: the serifs of the Roman chisel, the flourish of pen on parchment, and more recently, the mechanical construction of pixels and Bézier curves. The anatomy of a typeface – its ascenders, bowls, terminals, x-height – operates as a kind of dialect; a grotesque sans and a humanist serif speak with very different inflections. Typography is rarely neutral – it encodes values like reliability, luxury, rebellion, sincerity, intimacy. True geometry rarely reads well to the human eye. Letters must often be subtly distorted to look correct. Circular letters like “O” overshoot the baseline and cap height to appear optically aligned; vertical and horizontal strokes differ in thickness to appear equal. These imperceptible adjustments are foundational to good type design.
Cordoba Regular
Typography is the design and arrangement of the simple graphic glyphs that embody language. A typeface conveys tone and emotion, often before a single word is read. Each character is shaped by centuries of use, misuse, and reinvention; these glyphs aren’t static, they mutate to reflect shifts in culture and technology. Type carries the fossil imprints of its evolution: the serifs of the Roman chisel, the flourish of pen on parchment, and more recently, the mechanical construction of pixels and Bézier curves. The anatomy of a typeface – its ascenders, bowls, terminals, x-height – operates as a kind of dialect; a grotesque sans and a humanist serif speak with very different inflections. Typography is rarely neutral – it encodes values like reliability, luxury, rebellion, sincerity, intimacy. True geometry rarely reads well to the human eye. Letters must often be subtly distorted to look correct. Circular letters like “O” overshoot the baseline and cap height to appear optically aligned; vertical and horizontal strokes differ in thickness to appear equal. These imperceptible adjustments are foundational to good type design.
Cordoba Fill
Cordoba Character Set
About
Cordoba is a distressed outline sans taken from the inlaid stone lettering in the Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba (Spanish: Mezquita–catedral de Córdoba), a medieval Islamic mosque that was converted into a Roman Catholic Christian cathedral in the Spanish city of Córdoba, Andalusia. Thoough different examples of the lettering share a common style, and were probably executed by one person around 1890-1900, there is a broad range of weight and shadow treatments, giving it a lively vernacular charm. Photographic reference was compiled (below, right) and the most interesting variants used for the final font. The Fill version is intended to be layered with the outline version for twotone effects.
