Naancy is a name that reflects Damien Gautier’s initial inspiration: the French city of Nancy and its school of art and design. He was drawn to the challenge of Art Nouveau: combining the arabesques and curves inspired by nature with the geometry of an alphabet and the precision required in developing a digital typeface.

  It was while wandering the streets of France and Europe that Damien Gautier laid the foundations for this typeface, which he has been working on for over five years. 

  Drawing from architecture—its rhythm, the juxtaposition of styles, the play of light and shadow, the layout of facades, motifs and ornaments—and from nature, with its unexpected forms, curves, and intertwining shapes.

  In an urban context, architecture and nature coexist and engage in what can sometimes be surprising relationships. Damien Gautier translates this proximity and broad diversity into a striking typeface. Naancy is, in fact, a multifaceted typeface. At first glance, it appears as a filigree titling font; the geometry is bold, and the spacing and kerning are particularly tight and contrasting. Then, through successive modifications and permutations, it evolves into an ornate—and even exuberant—typeface featuring ligatures, initials, and decorative letters.

  By combining letters from various available stylistic-sets, the words take on a rhythm from the repetition of a single letter or, conversely, play with these multiple occurrences to combine several of the letter’s available forms. At times, they are unexpectedly invaded by nature, with the repeated use of ornate letters.

Attentive to the signs he observes while walking through the urban landscape, Damien Gautier is particularly sensitive 

to those that reveal a handcrafted dimension and specific know-how. He closely examines wrought-iron doors, gates, railings, guardrails, and barriers, which, in their great variety, develop an aesthetic and geometry that seem to transcend styles: Classic, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modernism… The designer sees the construction of a typeface as being akin to the work of an ironmonger or blacksmith—rigorous in design, with curves forcibly constrained by the resistance of the metal.

Naancy is an unlikely blend of mathematical and natural rhythms, rigor and surprise, digital geometry and curves inspired by plants. Having collected motifs, Damien Gautier developed a style called “Ornament” composed of 52 decorative signs that reinterpret the principle of ornamentation once prevalent in foundry catalogs. Through the repetition of a single sign or by combining several different signs, Damien Gautier creates surprisingly contemporary friezes and frames.

This extremely refined typeface, blending traces of architecture with leaf veins, conceals an unsuspected potential. The filiform line allows us to increase the thickness of the stroke—almost to excess—and, by playing with layering and color, transforms a simple word into a typographic image.

Naancy’s many style sets transform its appearance, but it truly reveals its full potential when composed letter by letter, word by word. Naancy contains over 2,000 glyphs, with many more surprises to come!