Sophie O'Donnell

Malden Sans is a mischievous grotesque sans serif with charming details that gives designers a solid typographic voice. It was created by Michele Patanè with regular and condensed widths, as a utilitarian typeface family for print and digital environments.

It was originally designed as part of a type system for cinema magazines, and embodies the devil-may care attitude of the silver screen. Designer Michele Patanè looked back to an earlier era of typography to create the typeface, embracing unusual details, rather than ironing them out.

“There is a very naive way of using typography in the 30s and 40s, something not as clean as how it’s used in the late 50s and 60s when everything passed through a rationalisation of the typographic palette,” he explains. “In film magazines you can still see a bit of roughness, and I like that.”

This is a design that’s desperate to be used in editorial environments, and has been created to stand up to lower quality paper. It would be equally at home on posters, packaging, and even in digital environments where designers are looking for something more expressive than another geometric sans serif.

Malden Sans includes a Normal and Condensed range, with 7 weights in the normal and 6 in the Condensed, both including italics.