A whole typographic universe: With seven sub-families, NaN Rage will not leave you wanting for more

Rage was a beast of an undertaking at NaN. The panoramic project, though, began with a single sub-family – Rage Beau – before it took a swirling deep dive to finally arrive at 252 styles separated into seven distinct sub-families, each with their own voice. “With this project, we told ourselves ‘this time we’ll keep it simple,’ and ‘only a weight and a width axis.’ If only we had known.” The result is a type family that can only be described as a typographic universe. Rage Beau, as the starting point of the project, began as an exploration of the sub-genre of Egyptian-style faces and “how at NaN, we could create our own herald of this style, while also trying to avoid the North-American undertones some of these faces might have (although they were born in the UK),” says Founder Luke Prowse. However, as the foundry confesses, things escalated from there. One idea led to another – as it often does – and then to yet another, leading to a whole collection of sub-families that are each quite different from the other. As it stands now, the seven members of this typographic family tree are Beau, Slab, Sans, Soft, Poly, Quik and Zipp. The making of this universe called for all hands on deck, with all eight creative minds at NaN bouncing the font files between themselves, “often working on separate parts of the character set or separate aspects of the same font,” Prowse tells us. “The NaN team’s work is mainly divided between working on custom projects for clients and developing our retail projects. So a project like Rage, even with such a big range, always comes after client work in terms of deadlines. We work on our retail projects in the interstices left between our client projects. They are like pockets of air for a deep diver,” he explains.