Early during his career, Jonathan Hill worked as a graphic designer for a company called Mainartery, which largely dealt with clients in the music industry, in his hometown of Sheffield. While working there, Jonathan was given ample opportunity to refine his skills in the field of typography, and that’s what sparked his interest in pursuing type design as a professional career later on.
He would go on to establish his own logo and type design studio in 2006. The name, “The Northern Block,” emerged organically as a combination of wordplay on the former name of the Soviet-allied countries behind the iron curtain and the phrase, “North of Nowhere,” which was used by The Designer’s Republic, a group that heavily influenced Jonathan’s own inspiration.
These days, The Northern Block is well known for releasing modernist type designs that typically cater toward the industries of video gaming, computers, electronics, and mobile app developers. That said, their designs certainly aren’t limited to those industries; their body of work is extensive, exploring themes and styles of all types.
Above all things, The Northern Block puts an emphasis on crafting type designs that offer visual appeal, high functionality, and adaptable design versatility. The studio often collaborates with a number of graphic designers and typographers, like Mariya Pigoulevskaya.
While Mariya is from Belarus, she learned to speak English at a school that offered a variety of specialized linguistic subjects. Even though she had an opportunity to pursue further language studies and a career in education, Mariya really wanted to become involved in the creative community so she attended the Arts Academy in Belarus. A year later, a trip to the UK inspired her to continue her studies there.
During her final MA degree in Future Design, a chance encounter with a friend of Jonathan’s provided her with an opportunity to work with the studio on a Cyrillic alphabet project. The rest is essentially history.
Mariya eventually became a senior type designer at The Northern Block. Over time, her blossoming career in typography only continued to flourish in that creative studio in Newcastle upon Tyne, working beside Jonathan Hill and learning from his vast knowledge and experience in the field.
Released by The Northern Block, one of Mariya’s latest fonts is Manofa, a calligraphic sans serif that found its inspiration in Warren Chappell’s Lydian, a font that was first released in 1938. While Lydian’s rounded capital ‘O’ was indicative of a calligraphic style, Mariya’s own interpretation of the calligraphic sans serif was derived from experiments with the shape and form of the same letter.
The resulting type design, Manofa, is a sculptural display that is both crisp and contemporary in its design. It features an artistic structure that’s strong and unique, with a squarish architecture that is both modern and timeless. While Manofa is primarily a display type family, it can be used in small blocks of text with good legibility.
The complete Manofa family offers 16 fonts in its Regular style and a Condensed style; both are available in Light, Regular, Medium, and Bold, with corresponding italics for each. Manofa offers additional features that include denominators, numerators, ordinals, subscript, superscript, scientific inferiors, and stylistic alternates for greater versatility. Its multilingual support extends to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Dutch, Pinyin, and Basic Greek for fantastic global accessibility.
The Northern Block currently offers 100 products through YouWorkForThem, a range of type designs that span just about every style and theme. Visit their portfolio to view the rest of their extensive body of work and bookmark it so you can keep an eye on their future additions as they are released!
