Naancy
Five years of urban wandering distilled into a single ornamental system
Naancy is a display typeface by Damien Gautier developed over five years, rooted in the Art Nouveau heritage of Nancy, France, and the ornamental geometry of wrought-iron architecture encountered while walking European cities. At its simplest it reads as a tight, high-contrast filigree titling face; through multiple stylistic sets it expands into a system of ligatures, decorative initials, and ornate letters that can flood a word with plant-like forms. A companion 'Ornament' style supplies 52 decorative signs designed for composing friezes and frames. The family exceeds 2,000 glyphs.
Set in Naancy
Insights
- Gautier likened typeface construction to ironwork—rigorous geometry with curves forcibly shaped by material resistance—a conceptual frame that guided the design's tension between precision and ornament.
- The 'Ornament' style reinterprets historical foundry catalog ornamentation as 52 discrete signs that can be repeated or combined to build contemporary friezes.
- Tight, contrasting spacing is a deliberate starting condition; layering and color shifts on the filiform strokes convert individual words into typographic images.
- Multiple stylistic sets allow the same letterform to appear in several variants simultaneously within a single word, producing rhythm through repetition or variation of a single glyph.
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