Inside The Northern Block’s ongoing rebuild of its typeface library

The Brand Identity: The Northern Block has been releasing typefaces from its base in the North East of England since 2006, building a library of modernist sans serifs that have found their way into the hands of designers working on brands like Disney, Netflix and Ubisoft.

The foundry’s Next Series is the result of going back into that catalogue – Loew, Nuber, Lintel, Nurom – and rebuilding each family from the inside, expanding scripts, redrawing characters, retooling the engineering and bringing in international collaborators to shape parts of the work the original designs were never set up to carry. The turning point that prompted the series can be traced back to a single moment.

Loew began as a request from a Newcastle-based studio for a neutral and dependable typeface – what they described as ‘corporate regularity.’ Hilton Worldwide then picked it up for use across its global communications, and the design simply was not built for what the brand needed it to do. Feedback from those deployments pointed to broader script support, greater digital consistency, more flexibility in hierarchy and spacing, and improved performance at small sizes.

For Jonathan Hill, Founder & Director at The Northern Block, the question of what to do with a typeface at the peak of its commercial life became the founding question of the series. “We don’t want the artistry of our type to stand still. How do we make sure that maturity stands the test of time?” he reflects. Loew Next became the first answer. The Next Series brought specialists into the foundry on the basis of script knowledge and cultural authorship. Liron Lavi Turkenich consulted on Hebrew for Nurom Next. Amélie Bonet, Erin McLaughlin and Pooja Saxena shaped Loew Next Devanagari.

Lara Captan and Hasan Abu Afash worked on Nurom Next Arabic. “The Northern Block don’t control experts; we invite them in and respect what they do. We embrace what is brought and what decisions are made. We have learned a new level of respect for the process and for cultures,” Hill explains. That view on collaboration shows in Nurom Next, which has been 10 years in development and passed through multiple sets of hands and international borders in that time.

Built on the foundations of an early grotesque and neo-grotesque system and reshaped into something quieter and more human, the family now supports over 350 languages, with the new version adding Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and Vietnamese to its Latin core. Each expansion has carried the particular sensibility of the designer working on it, with the foundry holding the system together rather than directing every decision.

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The article discusses a significant update in type design that impacts brand strategy, particularly for major clients, while also introducing innovative approaches to typography that are relevant to design professionals.