Inde­pen­dent Type Foundry Advent Cal­en­dar – Day 24: NaN

For the last day of this year’s Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar, we’re back in Berlin. NaN is a foundry and type design practice “balancing weirdness and wisdom” that was founded by designer Luke Prowse. In late 2021, Luke was joined by Jean-Baptiste Morizot, who had already launched Phantom Foundry in 2018.

NaN’s growing library of retail typefaces could be described as beautifully weird and playful, full of expressive creative talent combined with font engineering at the highest level.

NaN Tragedy is a functional but unconventional serif designed by Jean-Baptiste Morizot. Based on a classic skeleton, quirky details and an exaggerated calligraphic contrast are less pronounced in the text styles but more extreme and expressive in the display cuts.

NaN Holo by Luke Prowse is a constructed neo-grotesk with “biological forms disrupting an otherwise tensely machined flow.” The mix of rounded and squared details makes it a solid and reliable but also surprising and warm design.

NaN Jaune by Jérémy Landes is a sans-serif full of contrast and contradictions – from closed apertures to deep ink-traps to extreme stroke contrast, in three different optical sizes – Maxi, Midi, and Mini.

And then, there’s NaN Tresor, Christoph Koeberlin’s latest masterpiece. Peculiar, charming, full of energy, and immediately recognizable. A revival not of a single typeface, but of an entire genre. NaN Tresor is an homage to the very first grotesk typefaces with all their charming inconsistencies. To reproduce the feeling of this era, Christoph took an unconventional approach: he carefully translated the historical inconsistencies and quirky design details into a typeface with three optical sizes and almost 2000 characters and glyph variations, sometimes eight alternates per glyph plus swashes. In the variable font, this idea fully unfolds: the individual irregularities and distinctive characteristics of the design can flexibly inform each other into a wide range of playful variations.

You can get trial fonts of all NaN typefaces – and also make sure to try the lovely color picker in the upper right corner if you’re visiting the website on a larger screen… 😍

☞ https://www.nan.xyz

PS: Happy Holidays! ✨🎄🤗

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This post is part of the Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar 2022

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