About
Type designer whose collaborations include the bespoke typeface for Pentagram's Frieze identity, developed as a flexible system for the organisation's publications and events.
SourceIn their own words
Gothic is not a grotesque, and in this way it needed to differentiate itself from the ubiquitous genre in a lot of small details.
That’s a conscious choice we made from the very beginning: drawing for titles but with optimisations for smaller sizes already baked-in.
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.
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.
Sharing is sometimes caring.
We’re a shop of shops. Each one is yours.
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.
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.
The dynamism of the italic comes from our wish to double down on the expressiveness of SuperX and shape it as a titling family.
If one wants to use both versions in the same line of text, they will have the same visual size, look aligned, and the line-space will be consistent.
Articles & interviews10
- NaN Gothic reimagines American sans serif gothics
Berlin-based type design practice NaN has released NaN Gothic, a 288-style interpretation of warm, sturdy American sans serif gothics. The family comprises display-oriented Big, text-focused UI, and UI Mono subfamilies, with Latin and Arabic support, wide width ranges, italics and an accessibility character set. Its defining traits include organic swept terminals, oval rounds, open apertures and distinctive spacing.
- fonts.xyz Launches Marketplace for Independent Type Designers and Fair Licensing
The Brand Identity interviews Luke Prowse, founder of NaN, about the launch of fonts.xyz — a new online marketplace designed to empower independent type designers with fair licensing and no-code foundry tools. The platform offers an 80% royalty split, a 1% solidarity tax, and a simplified licensing model based on company headcount. It aims to democratize type distribution and make font selling accessible to everyone from students to professionals.
- "NaN SuperX: New Typeface Enhances Headlines, Saves Space"
The Brand Identity features NaN’s latest release, SuperX, a serif and sans typeface pair designed for impactful headlines and tight spacing. Developed by Berlin-based foundry NaN under founder Luke Prowse, the system revives phototype-era aesthetics with large x-heights and short ascenders for efficient vertical use. The family includes serif and sans versions with italics in Latin and Arabic scripts, optimized for editorial and digital applications.