“Noeud” drop caps

For a while now I’ve been fiddling around with the typography on this site quite a bit. I run all the micro-typographic stuff through the OpenTypography framework that I’ve built. I’ve researched and tested quite a few fonts for the body text as well, you can see a few of them in the Open Source serif fonts for body text article. But I am still looking for something to create a more dynamic and vital look for the articles, hence drop caps have been on my wish list for a while now.

A few days ago I spotted a quite quirky but really nice looking all caps font, Noeud, meaning «knot» in French, in Ellmer Stefans Twitter timeline.

The font isn’t released yet but I asked if I could use it and Ellmer was very generous and sent me a beta version Noeud to work with. As soon as I got it I started testing it out.

Here is some of the initial mockups.

What I really like about the Noeud-font is that it’s very strict and restrained but still very ornamental, expressive and humanist.

I have got the permission from Ellmer to use it on the site so I am just fixing some last bits and setting up the individual ‘kerning’ for each letter.