NaN Gothic is a warm, quirky take on the everyday American sans serif — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

NaN Gothic is Berlin-based type design practice NaN’s rendition of the gothics – the American sans serifs that appeared and grew popular in the first half of the 20th century. They were everyday typefaces packed with warmth, quirks and sturdiness, which NaN chose to keep as central characteristics. The result is what the foundry calls “familiar, non-pretentious, but very dynamic.”

The huge type system has 288 styles, divided into three subfamilies. NaN Gothic Big comes in nine weights across eight widths, from Compressed to UltraWide; NaN Gothic UI in three widths, and NaN Gothic UI Mono in one, each with an upright and an italic. It’s also drawn in two scripts, with the Latin supporting 527 languages and the Arabic another 28. It is credited to the NaN team: Hugues Gentile, Fanny Hamelin, Fadhl Haqq, Léon Hugues, Jean-Baptiste Morizot and Luke Prowse.

“Gothic is not a grotesque, and in this way it needed to differentiate itself from the ubiquitous genre in a lot of small details,” Prowse tells us. The detail that NaN started from is the tail of the ‘a,’ which he describes as “dynamic, organic, almost calligraphic.” “You’ll find this kind of detail a lot in brush-painted sans serifs made by sign-painters across the globe. It felt natural to expand on this and try to bring more of these kinds of shapes in other letters. That’s how the sweeps were born.” The sweeps appear on the ‘t’ and the ‘y.’ The curves are round throughout, the capital and lowercase ‘S’ and ‘K’ sit top-heavy, and the apertures – the gaps where a letter such as an ‘a’ or an ‘e’ opens out – are wide. Prowse’s claim for all of it is that it gives NaN Gothic its identity “while not making it an extravagant typeface.”

Gothic Big is drawn for large sizes, on tight spacing and a big x-height, but Gothic UI lowers that x-height and loosens the spacing so that the type remains legible at small sizes over long stretches of text. “NaN Gothic Big and UI essentially share the same skeleton. Taken out of context, most glyphs look very similar,” Prowse details. “But then it’s the texture, the rhythm of the text that are very different between the two fonts. Changing proportions and spacing goes a long way in giving a font its identity. All shapes are pretty open in Gothic, be it in Big or UI.” The apertures of the ‘a’ and the ‘e’ are practically identical across the two. “That’s a conscious choice we made from the very beginning: drawing for titles but with optimisations for smaller sizes already baked-in,” Prowse notes.

“One thing that takes NaN Gothic apart from other fonts spanning so many widths is how oval the round shapes are, and how oval they stay in Compressed as well as in Wide,” he continues. “The first solution that comes to mind when drawing a narrower font is to straighten the sides of the glyphs, rounds included. We followed this solution with our previous releases NaN Holo and NaN Metrify, for instance, keeping the straightened sides even in the counters of the wider styles. But with Gothic we didn’t want any of the mechanical undertone it gives; we wanted to keep things feeling more organic.” The spacing in Gothic Big is what Prowse calls “tight but not touching. This creates very dynamic spaces between the glyphs, where some of them can come very close to each other while some others, like two obliques side by side (think ‘vy’), create a gap. This, added with the fact that the white inside of the glyphs is sometimes more important than the white between them, especially in the lighter style, creates this unique texture that we love so much.”

Gothic Big has a 20° backslant across all eight of its widths, leaning the opposite way to its 20° italic; Gothic UI has none. “What makes something worth drawing is a tricky question,” Prowse tells us. “Every good idea during the design phase becomes a bad idea during production if it adds work. But we need to stick with our ideas, or we will never do anything fun. But this has limits, and if backslanted versions make sense for titling fonts, it doesn’t really for running text ones. Adding them to the UI version would make the purpose of this family less clear.”

Gothic UI Mono, where every letter sits on the same fixed width, is built on Gothic UI, since Gothic Big’s spacing is too tight for a monospace. “You have to acknowledge that a monospace font is a totally different kind of bird than a proportional font. It is used in different contexts, with different goals in mind,” Prowse explains. “That’s why we thought it deserved its own subfamily.” The sweeps stay, but they were the hard part. A swept letter leaves lopsided white around it, so NaN steadied the ‘J,’ ‘j,’ ‘r’ and ‘i’ with serifs. “But keeping these sweeps does a lot of the heavy-lifting in giving NaN Gothic UI Mono its identity as well as making it related to the rest of the NaN Gothic members.”

Alongside the Latin, NaN Gothic has an Arabic version with the same widths – Gothic Big’s eight and Gothic UI’s three. “Designing NaN Gothic Arabic was super interesting because many of the characteristics that are in the Latin, the oval rounds, the dynamism, are things that are natural to the Arabic script and that are often tuned down in the counterparts to Latin sans,” Prowse tells us. “What proved more challenging was drawing condensed versions of the Arabic, but it’s not our first try at this exercise. And there again the oval, almost pointy rounds prove to be of great help to keep the Arabic features alive in narrower styles.” The two scripts are not drawn off each other. “For instance, NaN Gothic Arabic features some distinctive oblique endings absent from the Latin,” he continues. “The relative contrast between its thicks and thins that we allowed it to take gives it a lot of charm and warmth.”

NaN Gothic also comes with an Accessibility Set, alternate letterforms for the characters that a reader can confuse. It is, in Prowse’s account, something designers, agencies and clients increasingly expect to find in a typeface built for interfaces. “We differentiate between ‘I,’ ‘l’ and ‘1,’ between ‘O’ and ‘0,’ (etc.) with obvious design features,” he adds. “It’s not exactly something that increases the legibility of a font across the board, but it indeed helps in a context where you will have usernames, passwords and short bits of text.”