Typo-Galerie - Noa

Font Designer: Nina Lee Storm, 2004

The Danish designer Nina Lee Storm designed Noa for use on television and computer screens during the late 1990s. She began her six-member type family with the creation of bitmap fonts, developing their print outlines only secondarily. Noa’s letters exhibit a tall x-height, coupled with very short ascenders and descenders. Storm is proud to report that her typeface also looks very “Danish.”

Nina Lee Storm about Noa:
“The first letter of my three daughters’ names can be put together to spell out: “Noa”.

Six years ago, when I studied at Designschool Kolding, my task was to design a font for Danish television (DR) — as a school project. For that media it would be best with a relative square shape.
My working title for the font was “Media”.

But the name Media was already in use …
At that time my second daughter Alma was about two years old, and the name looks good in writing and would appear at the top of the alphabetic font list — so I renamed it: “Alma”.

After signing the license agreement with they asked me to come up with another name for my font. So the third name for my second font became the final choice: “Noa”.

To me “Noa” is an old typeface — not that I have been working on it for all six years, but the idea and design is six years old. However, when Linotype was interested, Akira Kobayashi gave me a long list of suggestions for improvement. I believe these made the difference, and for that I am grateful!

Kerning and spacing is as important as the design. The process takes ten times longer than the design itself. But perhaps that’s just my experience.”