A tale of destruction and reinvention: introducing The Northern Block’s perfectly imperfect Mynor-B

While the design process of a typeface is usually pretty linear and clear-cut from drawing to rendering, the making of The Northern Block’s Mynor-B took a different route, embracing an unexpected yet organic approach to putting a typeface together. The typeface’s story began with the first iteration of Mynor, a modern, squarish sans-serif typeface inspired by 1950s machine-readable fonts like OCR-A and B. “The limitations of technology dictated that forms contain few curves; so, Mynor created a perfect template for something polar opposite in its aesthetic, promoting a different way of constructing letterforms,” says Jonathan Hill, Founder of The Northern Block, who designed the typeface. Five years after Mynor’s launch, Hill began destroying the typeface’s letterforms with deliberate irrationality. “Breaking down Mynor was about disassembling straight lines with curves, but not mathematically-measured curves using software input,” he explains, likening the tearing to ripping a sheet of paper. “Once I’d come to rest at the endpoint of the line,” he continues, “I would decide if the line was good to leave alone or if I would have to make some repairs. The natural beauty lies in embracing the errors and not trying to add too much repair.” This appreciation for the beauty in imperfection is echoed in the way Hill broke down the structure of the letters and restored them, in a process akin to the Japanese art of Kintsugi, which involves repairing broken pottery with gold. This helped the typeface move away from the strict geometric style of its predecessor and towards a more organic take. “Mynor-B challenged our process of making professional, usable typefaces by questioning the rules of what the industry considers the proper practice – we owned the errors, looked past the mistake, and made the imperfection perfect,” the designer notes.