NaN Gothic is a warm, quirky take on the everyday American sans serif

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.”