Meet NaN SuperX: a serif and sans typeface pair designed for impactful headlines and tight spacing

When Berlin-based foundry NaN set out to create SuperX, they had their sights set on reviving a particular aesthetic from typography’s past whilst serving the practical needs of today’s designers. The result is a system that pays homage to the phototyping era’s characteristically oversized x-heights, delivered through a serif and sans pairing designed specifically for making headlines work harder in tighter spaces. “The idea of having a serif typeface with a very big x-height was in our heads for a while now, and that’s something we already experimented with in the past,” explains Founder Luke Prowse. The concept finally took shape at the end of summer 2024, evolving rapidly from initial sketches to a complete eight-weight system with italics in both Latin and Arabic scripts in less than a year. The SuperX system operates on a foundation of practical advantage disguised as stylistic choice. Those disproportionately large x-heights paired with correspondingly short ascenders and descenders create something unusually valuable for headline design – the ability to set type large with exceptionally tight line spacing. “You can fit more lines in a limited vertical space, and it also makes SuperX look bigger than most other fonts at the same pixel or point size,” notes Prowse.