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Ritupriya Basu“Go big or small or go home.” A flexible serif, NaN Serf, can shuffle between sizes with equal style
“Serf was born from the influence of metal typography, especially Dutch typefaces, and we wanted to translate the quality and warmth of those analogue designs within a digital context,” says Luke Prowse, Founder of NaN, about the foundry’s serif release, NaN Serf. Tailored to excel at all sizes, Serf is an answer to the foundry’s intent to add a multi-functional serif to the NaN library, which mostly consists of “much louder designs,” as Prowse describes. “We’ve always admired Dutch text typefaces, offering warm textures and open counters whilst prioritising legibility, and we wanted to have a go ourselves. We were also sure it would become an essential tool for our friends and clients.”
Available in four optical sizes, and in eight weights in each size, Serf is designed to be incredibly versatile, allowing it to fit into a variety of applications. “At small sizes, it imparts a warm letterpress quality, while at larger sizes, vectorial shaping gives it a crisp, contemporary finish,” says Prowse. “Go big or small or go home,” he adds. Infused with the tradition of printed type, the typeface is rich in details that reveal or shroud themselves depending on the size and the weight of the font in use, and give the typeface a certain edge both on screen and print. “A lot of details that might not be visible in a small screen size will still have a warm and organic feel that is so enjoyable – especially in this style of serif. I’m thinking, for instance, of how we drew our serifs asymmetrically, creating a soft curved bracket outside the letters and a plain angle on the inside, allowing for bigger and clearer counters,” shares Prowse.
The making of the typeface was akin to an “insane ping-pong game, with ever-changing players and teams, as well as an endless back and forth between all of them,” he says. The team began with defining the text’s texture and rhythm, and once they locked in on the right proportions, they dove into the details, focusing on the individual letterforms and amping up their inherent personality, without disturbing the typeface’s visual harmony. “It was an exciting process, with the fonts constantly changing hands – evolving, mutating, gaining and losing personality traits in a kind of motion blur. 95% of ideas from this period stayed in our drawers, but the practice helped us slowly distil who and what Serf really is.” remembers Prowse. “Once this personality settled, the production load was shared between different team members, allowing for an intense Q&A workflow where everyone checked and finessed the work of others, never leaving anything unturned or unrefined.”
The intensive process also led the team down two different routes, resulting in two distinct versions of the typeface, Serf A and Serf B. Serf A features stylised squared tittles, punctuations and dots, while Serf B sticks close to tradition, with rounded forms. The idea behind this seemingly small detail has “considerable consequences on the feeling one gets from the font,” Prowse insists. “Serf A has a more minimalist, rational and modernist vibe to it, while Serf B is more traditional, but also is equally as warm. This distinction can be a great help when setting the tone of voice for a publication or a brand.” This stylisation, though, isn’t limited to tittles and periods. The team pushed the logic as far as they could, and altered any glyph that they thought should follow the rule, including the asterisk, smiley, umlaut and so forth. “We could have hidden these details behind some OpenType features, but our experience tells us that such features are used less than we would like, and that people tend to forget about them,” Prowse tells us. “So, we decided to create these separate sub-families, bringing these distinctions to the front stage – a strategy we also used in our previous release, Metrify, with its three different flavours, which proved a very useful tool for designers.”
As it’s designed to live comfortably both on screen and on paper, the team that crafted Serf would love to see the typeface thrive in projects with heavy typography that juggles both formats, “so say, a cross-platform publication or magazine, or a brand with a strong online and physical presence,” reveals Prowse. “We created Serf to be able to shine in many environments and would love to see designers using it to its full potential.”