With a rich yet fictional backstory, NN Swinton is a love letter to Swiss and American grotesques

Synergising human and AI strengths, NN Swinton and its development are far from the expected. Crafted by Nouvelle Noire Type Foundry, the grotesque promises a touch of magic with its sharply-cut letterforms. Taking a unique approach in its introduction, Swinton is accompanied by a fictional backstory, a creation brought to life with the help of AI. Told with the help of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, Nouvelle Noire recount the ambitions of fictional designer Cram Zord, who built NN Swinton with a standardised look but incorporated the type with unexpected details, sparking joy and enchantment among those who use it.

“When you are releasing a new typeface you don’t really have many use cases to showcase the typeface,” the (real) designer Marc Droz explains. For fun, the team had been playing around with generating showcase imagery with Stable Diffusion, while also writing fictional text with ChatGPT. “What at first sight was meant to be a joke, turned out to reveal itself as a communication concept,” he continues.

As for the typeface itself, the design’s origin stems from two different sources of inspiration – classic Swiss grotesques such as Helvetica and Akzidenz Grotesk, and American grotesques like Trade Gothic or Franklin Gothic, culminating in a versatile typeface that infuses an expressive character into every design. “There was a very clear intention not to copy these historical design patterns,” Droz notes. “The aim was to create an independent design that takes the idea of these earlier references forward without reproducing them.”

One of its key attributes is the uniform width of uprights and italics across all weights, a complex and challenging feature to create, that successfully eliminates any form of text shifts when transitioning between styles, saving designers plenty of time.

Elsewhere, the typeface is peppered with “secret gems,” as the team puts it. “The ‘g’ and ‘k’ are special,” Droz adds. During the design process, he initially drew a single-story ‘g,’ reflecting the popular Swiss grotesque style. However, to provide a distinctive flair, he later chose a double-story ‘g,’ setting the typeface apart from traditional designs. “Furthermore, the ‘k’ and ‘e’ have very thin diagonal and horizontal bars, especially in the light weights,” he adds. “This is an extra design feature which enlivens the typeface. Another characteristic is that the typeface has Old style figures, which is also unusual in historical models of grotesque typefaces.”

Swinton is available in an extensive range of weights and formats, from Extra Thin to Extra Black Italic, perfect for applications of all formats and scales. The typeface also accommodates various font formats such as Desktop, Web, and Variable (on request). For those interested in experiencing the versatility of Swinton, Nouvelle Noire Type Foundry offers free trials on their website, allowing anyone to test out the typeface and make it their own.

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