MGF: the Milanese cut

MGF Sans was born as the custom face of Milano Graphic Festival, the first widespread event of graphic design, illustration and visual cultures held in Milan, 25–27 March 2022.

Designer Fabrizio Falcone – along with festival director Francesco Dondina – was looking for a display face evoking the international achievement of the Swiss Style and the golden age of Milanese graphic design. The result is MGF, a display face somehow reminiscent of the 1960s Milan design scene and then celebrating the shapes of the most representative typeface of those years, Helvetica and its Italian would-be competitor Nebiolo’s Forma, conceived and designed by Aldo Novarese and ‘The Milanese Dream Team’.

Specimen of Forma hot-metal typeface. Its first series were released by the Italian type foundry Nebiolo in 1969.

A contemporary geometric grotesque

MGF Sans comes with slanted italics and two weights, Regular and Bold, and it is available as a variable font too. Its main feature of MGF is its combination of the geometric and Grotesque sanserif styles: ‘We developed a grotesque with a clear geometric structure, as can be seen in the alternates of a i, t, l and in the squared curves of letters such as f or j. These design decisions allowed for a contemporary output playing with the main features of Swiss typography: big x-height, tight spacing, wide capitals of uniform width, etc.’

MGF’s character set includes 16 directional arrow glyphs (8 outside the circle, 8 inside the circle) that recall similar details of Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda’s design for the New York subway, and that today, says Falcone, ‘look so much like a smiling emoji’.

Left. Signage for New York subway, designed by Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda in the early 1970s. Right. Signage for Metropolitana Milanese, also designed by Noorda in 1962–1963.

From Milano Graphic Festival (MGF) to Biennale Internazionale di Grafica (BIG)

2022 Milan Graphic Festival intended to be a catalyst for ideas and relations surrounding the world of visual communication and also to emphasise its fundamental role in the context of urban regeneration and its overall impact on citizen wellbeing. Thanks to its success, the new BIG – Biennale Internazionale Grafica was born. And its custom face MGF Sans was updated.

MGF in use: shopper and poster.

To meet the needs of BIG’s visual identity project, Fabrizio Falcone with Alex Bossi as type developer, updated the Milan Graphic Festival custom face by adding to MGF Sans a bold weight and the related slanted italics, and developing the variable font.

Biennale Internazionale Grafica is a Milan-based festival dedicated to communication design and visual cultures that aims to promote visual communication design outside the inner circle of experts.