The story

The Mallory typeface began as a personal experiment in dual citizenship: part British and part American, and based upon a long relationship with mixed heritage and nuanced palettes. Through 110 weights and five widths, Mallory treats history and complex identity as a launchpad.

From the type designer of Gotham, Retina, and Interstate, the Mallory family is geometric but not strict, tempered by more relaxed gestures throughout the family. This typographic composite creates an inviting organic texture without being distracting. It sets paragraphs and headlines with equal confidence, and with its MicroPlus styles, Mallory can also set the smallest sizes on any screen or page.

Font pairing is an underappreciated dilemma, and one of Mallory’s greatest strengths is as a companion. While Mallory can easily play the lead role in myriad branding or text situations, its approachable tone also makes it the ideal partner for almost any other genre, from a soft oldstyle or high-contrast modern to a commanding slab or staccato blackletter.

Mallory carefully balances its British and American lineage. The British influence is visible in the formal precision of capitals like ‘C, G, S’ as well as the splayed leg of the ‘R’. American influences are revealed in the gestural lowercase, its vivid personality constrained within those smaller shapes.

Mallory offers two optical sizes: Standard and MicroPlus. The Standard size distributes its 80 fonts over five widths (Regular, Compact, Narrow, Condensed, XCondensed), each with eight roman and italic pairs. MicroPlus has three widths (Regular, Compact, Narrow) with five weights of roman and italic pairs for 30 total font styles. Both the Normal and Compact can both serve as the “center” of the family, each with a full range of weights to build a palette.

The results

With 110 total styles, Mallory is both a cosmopolitan catalyst and transatlantic headliner. This intensely personal work from Tobias Frere-Jones is a pillar of his catalog, is used as the text face across his own website and other websites, and has been deployed by companies such as Papa John’s pizza.