Nirosta Typeface / Numbers

When I moved on to Nirosta’s numbers after designing the uppercase letters, something in the forms immediately struck me as different. There’s some kind of subtle unity in the Latin alphabet that I could see, from such close range to the forms, didn’t extend to the numbers we use.

Karen Cheng’s Designing Type explained what I had never thought to research: “the letters of our modern alphabet stem from the ancient Roman civilization, but the numbers are actually Indian and Arabic in origin.”

A fun fact: When the ungainly Roman numeral system was abandoned in Europe in the 1500s and the Arabic system adopted instead, French type designer (one of my favorites) Claude Garamond was the first to design a set of numbers that specifically belonged to a Latin typeface.