Industry: Design

Nicola Collection

From comping manual to typeface

Miguel Reyes encountered Tommy Thompson's 1946 comping manual, in which Caslon headlines were quickly hand-rendered with a broad-tipped pencil, stroke weight modulated by rotating the nib to create unusual serifs with interlocking, angled endings. That rough, informal quality became the lens for reinterpreting Nicolas Jenson's late-fifteenth-century Venetian types. Nicola is a robust, low-contrast typeface whose simplified details push toward slab-serif territory.

Set in Nicola

Insights

Pencil-nib rotation—not optical compensation—drove the stroke modulation in Thompson's renderings that seeded the design's unusual serif character.
The tension between rough hand-rendering and classical Venetian structure was a deliberate starting premise for the design.