Type Electives Display Type, Spring 2024
Nouveaudle
by Arlyn Ramos
With cuisine always on my mind and a hunger for creative fusions, my creative brief was to design a font inspired by noodles. I’ve cooked up a system that pulls characteristics from ramen and Art Nouveau fonts, with folds and squiggly details. Nouveaudle is a mostly connected script with alternates, ligatures, swashes, and curves that are scrumptious enough to eat. It’s great for headers, blockquotes, restaurant menus, recipe books, or whatever else you crave. Or set it in all caps for its graphic texture. The font has language support for Hawaiian, and work is in progress for Vietnamese diacritics.
In my process, my early sketches turned out a bit too literal and complicated. I had to separate myself from lettering and shift my thinking to creating a system. The breakthrough to solidifying the concept was after several rounds of typecooker exercises, when I drew a sketch that felt like an Art Nouveau font. Overall, the design process was a balancing act: finding ways to imbue quirkiness and personality, while maintaining legibility. At one point, I nearly abandoned the idea of making it a connected script. But the challenge of making the script was probably the best learning experience, forcing me to learn a little about contextual alternates, positional alternates, and ligatures.
Arlyn Ramos
Arlyn is a multidisciplinary designer with food always on her mind. As Design Exploder, she loves taking things apart to find the overlaps, reveal insights, and fuel creativity for her own design process as well as for others.
