Before finding his way to graphic design and typography, Jonathan Hill actually trained as a painter and decorator because his math and English scores were a bit below the entry requirements for most design colleges. After becoming a decorator, however, he felt his skills would be put to better use elsewhere. With college entry requirements loosening somewhat, he enrolled in art school in West Yorkshire. There, he worked on his draftsmanship and perspective drawing, both of which would later play a vital role in his career as a typographer.
Eventually, Jonathan had a breakthrough when he landed a job at a London-based studio. During his time working at the studio, he was able to refine his skills in typography and it led to him taking a much more serious interest in fonts. The studio’s projects included music packaging for many genres – pop, rock, blues, jazz, dance, and hip hop – and it opened up an entirely new world for Jonathan.
After working as a freelance designer for a while, Jonathan Hill established The Northern Block in 2006, as a design studio and type foundry in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Jonathan had always been inspired by the sardonicism and wit of The Designer’s Republic, an anti-establishment design studio in his hometown of Sheffield, England. Their own use of the phrase, “North Of Nowhere,” paired with reference to Soviet-allied countries behind the iron curtain, “The Eastern Bloc,” became the origin of The Northern Block’s name. Jonathan wanted to create a name that represented who he was as a designer, but in a less satirical way that was also easy for people to remember.
The Northern Block gives Jonathan a place where he can freely explore his creativity “without the constraints imposed by external influence,” as he told us. The studio champions collaboration between other graphic designers and himself, fostering a supportive environment of artistic cooperation that allows them to refine their work together in a joint venture.
The Northern Block is especially well known for crafting type designs that echo visual concepts of the more advancing industries of our modern world, things that include computers, electronics, mobile technology, and video gaming – like Borda, a font used in Tom Clancy’s The Division.
Back when Jonathan was still in design school, modernism was widely taught in his courses and it left a major impact on his own design work. He has a clear preference for clean and geometric font styles and one of his latest type designs released through The Northern Block, Paradroid, is a perfect example.
Jonathan describes Paradroid as “a pragmatic sans-serif which sits in the centre on the grotesque to geometric style spectrum.” This neutral type family is modern and functional while remaining highly legible. This family of 22 fonts features both proportionally-spaced weights and monospaced weights for greater design versatility.
Paradroid is available in seven weights that include Light, Regular, Book, Medium, Bold, ExtraBold, and Black with corresponding italics for each. Paradroid Mono is available in Light, Regular, Bold, and ExtraBold, with corresponding italics for each weight. The range of styles and weights makes this family appropriate for an incredibly wide variety of project types like displays, signage, headlines, editorials, advertising, UI design, websites, mobile applications, corporate communications, white papers, presentations, infographics, titling, product packaging, book cover design, publishing, video game development, programming, logo design, branding, and identity projects.
Paradroid offers a host of OpenType features, including case sensitive forms, discretionary ligatures, standard ligatures, numerators, denominators, fractions, ordinals, scientific inferiors, superscript, slashed zero, oldstyle figures, tabular figures, and stylistic alternates. It extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Vietnamese, Pan African Latin, Dutch, Pinyin, and Igbo Onwu for exceptionally far-reaching global accessibility.
Paradroid Mono offers ordinals, fractions, and stylistic alternates. It extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, and Basic Greek.
The Northern Block currently offers 100 products through YouWorkForThem. Visit their portfolio to view the entire range of their work and if you love innovative type designs with a lot of personality and versatility, you’re going to want to check back often to catch their new releases as they arrive!
