III. The type

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Because of its visual characteristics, a typeface can give a certain feel or mood to a message. As text is visible across almost every communication channels of a brand, a typeface is a crucial element of a visual identity. Big organizations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a custom typeface in order to convey the right message and to develop a consistency in their brand, e.g.: IBM Plex, Nokia Pure, Airbnb Cereal…

Today

Currently, Nano uses the pair Nunito + Noto Sans. I won’t go into details about matching typefaces ; before worrying about combinations, let’s break the pair down and examine the typefaces individually.

· Nunito

Nunito is visible on the Nano wordmark. It is set in uppercases and it’s ‘O’ has been customized (the original one is narrower). It is stated in the style guide that Nunito is also used for large texts and titles. Its upper cases have a geometric feel, emphasized by its rounded terminals, which compliments the mark’s shapes pretty well. They were drawn in a rigorous way: there is symmetry, simple shapes and regularity.

On another hand, the lowercases’ shapes are very organic, making the letters appear a lot more playful and friendlier than their upper counter parts.

Nunito’s dual tone is interesting, but problematic in the way it is used. The uppercase logotype doesn’t convey the same ideas than the lowercases titles and texts. A bit of a typographic Jekyll and Hyde.

· Noto Sans

Noto is an exciting ongoing project launched about 5 years ago by Monotype and Google. It aims to be a truly universal typeface, supporting all languages with a harmonious look and feel. This has never been done before as it represents a phenomenal amount of work.

It is groundbreaking, free, universal, open source.. Sounds familiar? 😉 The type itself leans towards friendliness without excess. In addition Noto is a type family offering a lot of variety : there is a serif font, a sans serif one and even monospaced and display ones.. Too good to be true? Well, kinda.

Minuscule tweaks

When I started giving thought to the Nano brand, I thought best to go for an evolution rather than a revolution. My initial thought was to set the logotype with Noto’s uppercases, so that the switch from Nunito wouldn’t be too drastic. But Noto’s uppercases doesn’t share any of the mark’s visual attributes. As Noto was perfect in every other ways. I started making more adjustments than originally planned to make it work.

The solution I found involved using the lowercase letters only and designing a single-storey ‘ɑ’.

And here is the full lock up.