The Northern Block is a collaborative type foundry in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Established by Jonathan Hill as what was originally an independent type studio in 2006, it has grown into one of the most internationally recognized foundries in the world.
Jonathan had begun his career as a painter and decorator, later studying at the Newcastle College of Art & Design and finding his way into the graphic design industry. He produced event graphics in Sheffield before joining Mainartery, a progressive design studio for the music industry. For three years, he designed music packaging for notable clients that included Universal Music, EMI, and Azuli Records. During his tenure there, he gained a considerable amount of knowledge in the field of typography, eventually setting out to establish his own studio.
For the first six years of its existence, The Northern Block served as Jonathan’s label for his own type designs. “Owning an independent type foundry is a tremendous challenge and requires an incredible amount of commitment, enterprise, leadership and importantly, craftsmanship,” Jonathan noted. “Personally, my apprenticeship to type design began after ten years as a graphic designer; what I learned professionally in that field didn’t bring me close to the skills required to produce a well-crafted type family.”
The Northern Block brand eventually became well known for its fresh and innovative approach to design, one that clearly favored modernist and tech-friendly architecture that worked beautifully in contemporary design applications.
As time passed, the foundry began to evolve into what it is today: a collaborative space that prizes creativity, ingenuity, and artistic talent. The lion’s share of their work remains focused upon the themes of technology and our modern world, including computers, electronics, video gaming, and mobile applications. Particularly if you’re a graphic designer who works in one of those industries, The Northern Block should be the first foundry you check out when you’re searching for the perfect type design for a new project.
The Northern Block’s client list is long and includes EA Sports, Disney, Hilton, Ubisoft, Lego, and Century 21, to name a very select few. While the foundry and studio maintains an environment of collaboration, many of Jonathan’s own fonts have found themselves among the most popular fonts available on the retail market.
One of his more recent designs released through The Northern Block is Nuber Next, a contemporary geometric sans serif revival of the original Nuber type family. Inspired by popular midcentury net-grotesques like Univers and Helvetica, Nuber Next is the next generation of the Nuber sans serif, featuring improved character shape, better uniformity, and a more flexible width system for greater versatility.
Nuber Next is a superfamily of fonts comprised of five widths: Compressed, Condensed, Regular, Wide, and Extended. Each width is available in nine weights that include Thin, UltraLight, ExtraLight, Light, Regular, DemiBold, Bold, Black, and Heavy, with corresponding italics for each.
With 90 total variations on hand, Nuber Next is an ideal choice for just about any project you can imagine. Its heavier weights and widths are brilliant in displays, signage, product packaging, posters, headlines, advertising, and any design project that needs a super strong sans serif at the helm. Nuber Next offers clear legibility, even in small point, making it a great option for everything from body copy to editorials, website copy, mobile applications, publishing, presentations, corporate correspondence, infographics, white papers, logo design, package inserts and information, flyers, marketing materials, business cards, labels, and more.
The range of widths and weights allow Nuber Next to work flawlessly in branding and identity projects where design cohesion is needed across multiple media outputs.
Nuber Next offers a number of OpenType features that include numerators, denominators, fractions, discretionary ligatures, standard ligatures, ordinals, superscript, oldstyle figures, proportional figures, tabular figures, and stylistic alternates for exceptional versatility. Its multilingual support extends to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Dutch, Pinyin, Venda, and Igbo Onwu for design projects that must reach a global audience.
The Northern Block currently offers more than 100 products through YouWorkForThem, a varied range of sans serifs, serifs, display fonts, and even script letter sets to suit design projects of all kinds. Visit their portfolio to view the rest of their work and bookmark it so you can watch for new additions as they arrive!
