A while back, Trent Walton tweeted a couple of fonts in his shopping list:
Those numerals though! 🤤
Noe Display is a pretty downright sexy. I enjoy display fonts, they tend to be on the more expressive side. Great for headlines, labels or unique packaged goods. A good display face can do a lot of heavy lifting in communication design.
I took a peak at the specimen website from Schick Toikka, an independent type foundry run by a two-person team in Berlin and Helsinki. You can read more about them here. But here’s a sampling from the specimen:
A note from the foundry about the origin of Noe Display:
Classic formal attributes of serif display type in the ‘rational’ mode include: a strong contrast between thicks and thins, fine details, elegant curves, and a vertical stress axis. This tradition goes back several generations to the showiest variants of Transitionals and Didones. Noe Display adopts these characteristics, along with features that reflect modern fashions of the mid-20th-century, such as a large lowercase and compact spacing. Beyond that genre-mixing combination, what makes this particular display face unique is the audacious way its strokes end. Large, wedge-shaped serifs come to a sharp point. Arches are capped with prominent triangular beaks. These features add a certain fierceness to the usual elegance of the genre, without detracting from its poise and finesse. It is a seamless dialog between slow, round curves and brisk, spiky terminals. The italic is especially fluid, with a blatantly cursive construction and long, tapering entry and exit strokes. Noe Display’s four weights have a nearly constant hairline weight, increasing the overall contrast as the stems thicken from Regular to Black, offering several degrees of drama and impact. This is distinguished display type with sparkle and bite.
What a lovely and whimsical summary from the designers. The atoms that make-up this type seem to have a complicated lineage, which is probably why this is such a fun display. The fluidity, heights and geometric appendages definitely adds “sparkle and bite.” There’s a certain salaciousness with the Black Italic, where the Regular Italic is refined and vogue.
Noe definitely has a bit more spunk than the last font I wrote about.