Noah™: An Interview

Noah™ by Fontfabric was the #3 bestselling new font on MyFonts in 2019. We spoke with the designers and learned more about the typeface!

What inspired you to design this typeface? Were you designing for a specific use case or customer? Or were you more focused on a particular artistic vision? Or some combination of the both?

The origin of Noah™ type family began with Noah Grotesque — a design with a modest x-height. A big part of the inspiration were typefaces with similar appearance due to their reduced lowercase heights, such as Neutraface and Brandon Grotesque. Our initial goal was to create something versatile and usable.

Walk us through the process of designing this typeface. Was there anything different about it, compared to your usual process? Did it come along more easily than others, or were there unique challenges?

The idea behind Noah™ was to make a coherent type system with various heights of the lowercase letters. The variety of x-heights allows endless possibilities in different situations — for long and short lines of texts, headlines in various sizes, etc. The typeface process had specific challenges in terms of design and production. One was to specify the different weights and metrics across the subfamilies to achieve consistent typographic color in text blocks.

Looking ahead, are there new projects you’re excited about? Anything you haven’t tried yet but are eager to explore?

The year 2020 will be very dynamic and full of surprises. We are going to release a couple of serif typefaces including a classic humanist type family suitable for text copy. Another one will be a high contrast display Didone with a rather adventurous character. Along with these, we are planning to release some unusual and pretty experimental families. We are excited to share that some of our best-selling typeface families will also be updated with lots of new features. Stay with us for our upcoming releases!