Narziss

NARZISS: An award winning display font NARZISS: An award winning display font

Narziss is a Neoclassic typeface that was created in 2009 by Hubert Jocham. It features Regular, Drop, and Swirl styles, and is available in 5 weights that range from Regular to Ultrabold. Narziss is elegantly designed with a large stroke contrast, featuring hairline strokes and rounded terminals. Narziss contains tabular and old style numbers, as well as traditional and stylistic ligatures. It is designed to be viewed at a large scale, which makes it an appropriate display text for logo designs, headers, brochures, cards, posters, and package designs.

Narziss was designed after Jocham created the Mommie typeface, which features ball terminals and a high contrasting stroke weight, but is designed as a script font. Narziss is a serif alternative. This font also allowed Jocham to experiment more with decorative swashes, swirls, and ornaments. This typeface is the only one of Jocham’s to have additional Cyrillic encoding, which allows it to be used in various Eurasian languages. Though Jocham designed the font family to be used as display type, it has gained such popularity that he is currently working on designing a version that is suitable for body copy. According to Jocham, “the Narziss-Drops has got some unique characters with drops that are not usually there.

The spencerian swashes of Narziss-Swirls grow out of the existing strokes and overlap with the next characters,” which is what allows the typeface to transition seamlessly from Regular to Swirl. In 2010, Narziss was awarded the Certificate of Excellence in Type Design by the Type Directors Club.

The Designer: Hubert Jocham HUBERT JOCHAM The Typeface Designer

Hubert Jocham is a German typeface designer. As a youth, he studied graphic design in both Germany and England, and learned technical skills from working in a print shop that used lead type. He focused his studies on the use of italic fonts in the Renaissance Era, which proved to be useful for him in understanding stroke relationships between different styles and weights. In 1998 he began working in England for Henrion, Ludlow and Schmidt in corporate branding. During his time there, he developed logotypes, brandmarks, and standards manuals for international companies. Today he is a freelance designer and started his own type foundry in 2007, called Hubert Jocham Type. Hubert Jocham has designed over 150 fonts, many of which are available to purchase on his website. The fonts can be bought as individual styles or weights, or the entire family can be purchased for a discounted price. Jocham has won four awards from the Type Directors Club. He takes pride in having a strong rapport with his clientele and works directly with them to create their perfect typeface. He has done work for Enterprise, Interbrand, GQ, Tiffany, Adidas and Vogue. He has the majority of his clients in Germany, London, and the United States.

Dissecting Narziss

One of the first visual takeaways from this font is the high thick to thin stroke contrast. It goes from hairline strokes to having thick strokes in the same letterform, with a contrast more dramatic than Didot. This becomes apparent as the weight of the font changes, as the hairline serifs stay the same while the larger stroke thickens.

It is a serif font, with beak terminals in the Regular style and rounded terminals in the Drop and Swirl styles.

It has a relatively high X height, with short ascenders, descenders, and cap heights. The height of the ascenders and descenders increases when the font is used in the Swirl style. It has wide letterforms with small character spacing. This font contains ligatures.

The decorative elements used in the Swirl style come from existing strokes on each character and are designed to overlap with the characters next to it.

This font contains both old style (non-lining) numbers as well as tabular (lining) numbers.

There is a flat apex on the capital A. In both the capital and lowercase K, the leg juts out from the arm, instead of the stem. The capital O is oval shaped with a vertical stress. The capital R has a swash leg.

Lowercase letterforms a, c, e, p, and d have large counters and apertures.

This font contains a double story lowercase g. The capital Q has a vertical stress with a swash-like tail.

There are slight distinctions in the design of the lowercase p, q, d, and b, which makes it more user friendly for people with dyslexia. However, there is little distinction between the lowercase l, capital I, and number 1, which could lead to some confusion with reading.