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CYBER/CAX
TYPEFACE REVIVAL

Based on a 1482 specimen, Cyber/Cax is a revival of William Caxton’s long out-of-print typography.

In the early days of the printing press, printers crafted each letter to mimick the stroke of the human hand. While browsing the Providence Library Updike Collection, I was charmed by the purposeful imperfections Caxton maintained in his work. To digitize it however, my challenge was to maintain that human spirit while creating something fresh and functional.

Rather than modernize Caxton’s type, I decided to retro-ize it. Exactly five hundred years after my source specimen was the year 1982. As part of the “Golden Age of Video Games”, ‘82 is specifically cited as the peak of arcades while personal computers simultaneously began their takeover...











Research/Process



1482 ︎ 1982

The European Middle Ages officially ended in 1453, and the Renaissance had been making it’s first strides a century prior. The Renaissance served as a bridge to the Age of Enlightenment which, to oversimplify, eventually led us to the modern age. As I prepared myself to digitize this blackletter type, I knew I wanted the result to hold conceptual value in addition to aesthetic. I wondered when in recent history we were in a period of transition similar to that of the Renaissance...



︎︎︎ TIME Magazine covers from 1982, all concerning the Digital Age. In fact, the 1982 “Man of the Year” was changed to “Machine of the Year” in honor of the personal computer.



Pole Position (1982)
Namco, Atari