Established in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, in 2006, The Northern Block is a design studio and type foundry established by Jonathan Hill. The foundry has grown to become one of the most well-recognized names in the design industry, working with companies from around the world and releasing retail type designs that graphic designers love to work with.
Jonathan started off by working as a graphic designer in the music industry. As time passed and his experience grew, Jonathan studied typography and refined his type design skillset, not knowing at the time that it would eventually lead to the creation of an incredibly successful studio and foundry.
The Northern Block is particularly well known for its modernist and contemporary type designs geared toward technologically-driven industries that include video gaming, computers, electronics, and mobile apps. When it comes to type design, high functionality and versatility are key components of the foundry’s work.
The Northern Block has worked with a growing number of designers and typographers who thrive on artistic collaboration — something the foundry puts a heavy emphasis upon. The studio is a creative haven of sorts, a place where people work together in a supportive and enthusiastic environment to craft unique character sets for design projects of all kinds.
One designer and typography who joined The Northern Block’s team in recent years is Mariya Pigoulevskaya, who has grown and flourished as a type designer through her experience with the foundry. She teamed up with Jonathan to create Hegval Display, newly released through YouWorkForThem.
Hegval Display is a contemporary and geometric sans serif type family with a modernist architecture. Inspired by the Gridnik and Helvetica families, Hegval Display blends elements from the design structures of both: the clean lines of Helvetica and the octagonal curvatures of Gridnik. This fusion is “mildly eccentric,” The Northern Block said, but it’s a fresh take on two classic styles brought together to build an entirely new and highly-versatile family.
Hegval Display is available Regular and Condensed widths, each available in weights that include Light, Regular, Medium, Bold and Black, with corresponding italics for each and a selection of built-in emojis. This range of widths and weights makes the entire family well suited to everything from displays and signage to headlines, editorials, advertisements, logos, product packaging, website designs and mobile applications, marketing materials, publishing, infographics, white papers, and more.
Hegval Display offers a number of OpenType features that include fractions, ligatures, ordinals, superscript, tabular figures, and stylistic alternates for greater versatility. It extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Dutch, Basic Greek, and Basic Cyrillic for exceptionally far-reaching global accessibility.
If you like Hegval Display but you’re not entirely sure about purchasing it, you can test out Hegval Display Light for free!
The Northern Block currently offers more than 110 products through YouWorkForThem, a varied range of type designs to suit projects of all themes. Visit their portfolio to check out the rest of their entire body of work and bookmark it so you won’t miss out on new additions as they arrive!
