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57-nao

57-nao

by ILOTT-TYPE
Individual Styles from $49.00
Complete family of 6 fonts: $196.00
57-nao Font Family was designed by Andrew Bellamy and published by ILOTT-TYPE. 57-nao contains 6 styles and family package options.

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About 57-nao Font Family


Designed in 1950s Japan by Okanao & Kushiro, the perfect partnership until artistic temperaments drove them apart. The duo spent years crafting the font with the working title “Messenjā”, Okanao bringing technical expertise to craft letterforms, while Kushiro made it his life, obsessively working late into the night to check pages for errors. For him the project was never about making money, it was an artistic endeavor to reprint the great Western works of literature. When he found out Okanao had secretly sold the rights to the font for use as a logo for a major Japanese manufacturer, Kushiro burned all evidence of the designs in a fit of passionate fury. The two reportedly never spoke again. “Messenjā” was thought lost forever until a type specimen was discovered in a vintage typewriter box bought on eBay. Now redrawn and available as 57-nao, a faithful and beautifully crafted monospace characterized by what is considered Okanao’s defining moment, the angular loop on the lowercase ‘a’.

Designers: Andrew Bellamy

Publisher: ILOTT-TYPE

Foundry: ILOTT-TYPE

Design Owner: ILOTT-TYPE

MyFonts debut: Aug 7, 2017

57-nao

About ILOTT-TYPE

ILOTT-TYPE is an independent New York City based boutique crafting a library of explorative and meticulously detailed contemporary designs. Each unique font is made with the highest degree of creative and technical quality and include international character sets and diacritics in styles suitable for setting display and text. ILOTT-TYPE is the sister company of ILOTT Vintage—the stylish resource synonymous with analogue photography—founded by British designer Andrew Bellamy in 2010.

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