Dominicale
A humanist serif that looks past the polished Renaissance revivals to the primitive, craft-inflected quality of the earliest roman types, tracing its roots to Carolingian minuscule rather than classical antiquity.
About
Where twentieth-century revivals such as Stanley Morison's Bembo emphasised the fine, mannered aspects of early humanist type, Dominicale pursues the opposite — the roughness and material directness of the originals. Its name references Carolingian minuscule, the actual historical source of humanist letterforms, rather than the Roman antiquity those fifteenth-century punch cutters claimed as inspiration. The result has a crafty, handmade flavour that distinguishes it from the smoothed-out interpretations that dominate the revival tradition.
Classification
Dominicale is rooted in early humanist type — specifically the Carolingian minuscule tradition that informed late fifteenth-century roman letterforms — and deliberately pursues the primitive, rough qualities of those originals rather than the refined mannered interpretations seen in twentieth-century revivals like Bembo.