While digging around through stacks upon stacks of old type specimens in search of a typeface that was out of copyright (drawn before 1923) and held my interest I found Condensed Corbitt. First off, I’m a sucker for a good condensed typeface; and secondly, the quirkiness of Corbitt’s capital caught my eye. It was love at first sight.
Time for some history: Condensed Corbitt was originally drawn by Nicholas J. Werner and first issued as a metal typeface by The Inland Type Foundry in 1900, then it later showed up in a few ATF (American Type Founders) specimens along with regular and extended styles.
Aside from the specimens I was lucky enough to stumble upon photos of Condensed Corbitt in wood type while hunting around flickr (courtesy of pearcetrip). With the aid of the specimens and wood type photos I was able to find every character, lowercase and capital, along with a few punctuation marks. The biggest challenge with this revival was deciding to draw the ends of the serifs since these varied a bit and were not always clear.
Throughout the drawing process, my goal was to remain as faithful as possible to the original drawings, or try to figure out what Nicholas Werner would have done in some of the less-clear references I had. I made those calls based on discussions he made in similar letterforms. Although I didn’t agree with all of the original drawings, I drew them all as-is then drew alternates for some of the letters that seemed too wide (E,F,S,T,U,s).
It was required that we complete all the lowercase and capital letters. I drew a few of the additional characters I found as well. Mid December was our final crit for this project. It was full of great work, guest critiques by Sumner Stone and Sara Soskolne, and ampersand cookies made by @thekarolina.
Moving forward, I would like to pick this up again and rework some of the drawings. Looking back I did some questionable things in terms of drawing since I was learning how to draw in Robofont, and how do it well. I’d also like to expand the character set through means of searching for additional missing characters, and creating some of the ones I can’t find. Then maybe someday release it… Then maybe revive the other styles I found… Then maybe do some italic styles… In other words: big plans for this one.