Wix unveils custom, digital-first typeface designed with Dalton Maag for users to deploy on their websites

Dalton Maag has worked with website-building platform Wix to develop a custom typeface for its suite of design elements, which users will be able to deploy in their site designs. Having found that users were often limited by fonts that were “beautiful but not made for the web,” the brief was to create something digital-first and versatile to its broad customer base, while still characterful and distinct. The result is Madefor – so called because it was “made for” its customers – which comes in nine weights, and features wide geometric proportions, smooth curves and a subtle flare on some of the terminals.

“We take a lot of pride in our in-house multidisciplinary design studio, and we noticed the brand was missing a critical element of design, a custom and easily recognisable typeface,” says Wix’s VP of design and brand Hagit Kaufman in a statement. Key to the brief was creating something that worked well online and maintained its personality when scaled across large displays, as well as supporting legibility in all sorts of interfaces and in long-form text. Dalton Maag and Wix’s in-house team developed five design routes, along the way clarifying the typographic proportions and features that best conveyed the brand’s tone, voice and core values.

Madefor is a fairly minimalist grotesk with wide-set letterforms that aim to give impact to the display fonts. Meanwhile there is understated character added through details such as the flared and angled cut on the ends of the ’s’, the pipe-bend short terminals of the lowercase ‘j’ and ‘t’, and the asymmetrical counters in the ‘b’, ‘d’ and others. The text styles are narrower and looser for efficiency at small sizes.

Matt Burvill, font developer at Dalton Maag, says the collaboration resulted in a “compact typographic toolkit with a subtle, but unique personality,” while the diversity of the team from a mixture of departments, backgrounds, cultures, and genders “allowed for balanced feedback and a typeface that truly feels like it was made for all”.

Madefor includes three display weights and three text weights, with each style in regular, bold and extra bold, and each weight available in a matching italic. It will be released to users in the near future.

Dalton Maag also recently worked with Rakuten to develop the Japanese ecommerce giant’s first cohesive font family.