Ego Trip

“What is Success?” Jérémy Landes asked himself, sitting in a warm bath with a bottle of 4°C champagne.

— Will I ever repeat my success?
— Can one find their own recipe for success?— By using the very name of success, can someone cast it upon them, as a spell, or does it contrarily risk to scare it forever?

I asked myself these perilous metaphysical questions while envisioning the creation of, wait for it, yet another (display) typeface. If a relative success struck me once or twice by chance, did the chance run out, or can it be called forth once more? Those questions could seem frivolous or ego-driven but success for one author of retail fonts (and for many creators) is tied to their ability to make a living. And this is the question that I'm asking myself: “will this new typeface help me to make a living?”

NaN Success is an ego-trip, a self reflection on the precariousness of the atomised creative worker, doomed, as we are told, to permanently seduce an audience, to keep it pleased and fascinated, over and over, always with a smile on our face. It’s a reflection on fashion and its tendencies. A self-fulfilling prophecy. As someone who fell by mix mistake and intuition into a certain kind of typographical zeitgeist, after that I felt that I needed to show — to whom? — that I could draw other shapes than organic ultra-display fonts. I restrained myself from drawing in this genre for a while. But why should I restrain myself from drawing something that brings me joy, only because it’s perhaps too fashionable? When Marie Kondo came to help me navigate through my type sketches and ideas, I realised that wobbly fonts, at the first place, brought me a lot of joy. Success is this spark of joy that I decided to embrace and to let grow and blossom.

Plasticity

NaN Success is an essay on titling typography. The 3 sub-families — Success Titling, Success Sans & Success Text — all answer, separately and together different questions and challenges raised by typography. It carries without shame the many idiosyncrasies that can make an interesting titling typeface today. I drew from my obsession for organic curves and love of stylistic oxymorons to birth this sort of Frankenstein’s type monster of a family.

Drawing inspiration from late Art-Nouveau typefaces, De Vinne, Louis Jou, and mixing it with a healthy amount of alien goo, I brought the master Success Titling sub-family to life. This display sub-family is packed with an insane 280 ligatures for both the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. In that, Success is an out-of-the-box titling machine for designers. But because this wasn’t enough, Success Titling was augmented with innovative multi-width ligatures and alternates, meaning that compressed and wide glyphs are mixed in with its ligatures providing an inimitable hand-lettered feeling.

Success Sans takes the distinctive curves of its big sister but applies it more sporadically on a condensed gothic skeleton, mixing together industrial and organic sources of inspiration. The Light style embodies a lace-like delicacy while the as-bold-as-it-can Black calls for both the forces of nature and hot steam, as a steam-punk golem. Note that Success Titling and Success Sans share the same proportions and, as such, can be seamlessly mixed together in the same line or even in the same word.

Success Text brings a long-reading, text-friendly horse to the family by taking everything that makes Success while keeping the very substance, the bone marrow of its titling siblings. It takes advantage of the organic qualities of the family in a tuned-down fashion to deliver a very warm and comfortable text rhythm. Its low contrast makes it solid and confident even at small sizes, while its unique weight disposal brings a subtle personality to the paragraph.

As a whole, Success stands as box of tools that might as well never been used together, but that can deliver surprisingly diverse tones of voice.

Sharing success

Ruminating on this topic of success one can’t avoid the question of selfishness and individualism that seem to be deeply rooted within. Our future is menaced by climate change and the responsibility of the global North on the difficulties encountered by peoples of the global South can’t be denied. One can only realise that the notion of success itself needs to be requestioned as a collective global one.

As a small step in the direction of sharing any success and making it meaningful for the most people, together with NaN we decided to donate 15% of the revenue generated by the sales of this type-family to the NGO fighting for climate justice ClientEarth. So that we build a « success with » instead as a « success against », or « at the cost of » others.

ClientEarth is an environmental charity using the law to create systemic change. Focusing on the most pressing environmental challenges, they force big corporations and governments to respect the environmental laws that are already in place but barely respected. Partnering with ClientEarth allows us to ensure that success can be embraced by the most in the future.

To pursue this dynamic, we decided to offer a 100% discounted license to use Success for any project related to nature conservation, sustainability and environmental justice. Please get in touch with such project at info@nan.xyz.