Nel: A Typeface with a Twist

Jasper Nijssen's Award-Winning Typeface Offers Nine Unique Styles

Jasper Nijssen, a renowned designer, found inspiration for Nel during a "mixing and matching" session with various typefaces. The idea was to create a typeface that could offer a regular style for body text and eccentric, fun versions for headers or highlighted text, ensuring coherence in design.

Nel stands out for its versatility and designer-centric approach. It offers nine different styles to choose from, including a regular version with uppercase and lowercase letters, a playful stencil version called Nel Brickbuild, and a dotted version known as Nel Dots. These options allow designers to mix and match styles while designing prints, posters, logos, websites, or identities.

The creation of Nel began with simple doodles that evolved into a grid. The Regular version consists of a width of three units and a height of nine units, with each unit made up of a square of three by three subunits. The Light version removes one sub-unit on either side to create a thinner line, and the Heavy version adds a sub-unit. The fun, display styles are playful twists designed upon this base.

Nel also offers a unique interaction feature. All styles are based on the same design choices, allowing them to be mixed and matched with ease. The Icons style, an all-icon font, has an extra feature: it's possible to combine glyphs. For example, typing the capital i and 3 results in a bus and a silhouette. If you type the number sign (above the 3) instead of a 3, the human is inside the bus.

The main challenge in designing Nel was defining the whitespace between the letters (kerning). The space needs to be different between every letter to look the same. This process, which required a lot of time and effort, was made smoother by the fact that some letters share quite a few similarities (the b > d > p > q).

Nel was awarded Silver in A' Graphics, Illustration and Visual Communication Design Award in 2022, a testament to its outstanding expertise and innovation. It is available on MyFonts.com, with all fonts available in OTF (local) and WOFF (web) files. The design is copyrighted to Jasper Nijssen, with all images credited to Designer Jasper Nijssen, Visuals WBP Nel, 2022.