The making of the Malina typeface

A kids chocolate packaging needed lettering. A type designer draws out characters which very quickly become quite numerous. Why don’t we turn them into a typeface? The art director supports the idea.

There is nothing exciting about merely filling in the gaps by designing the missing characters, so we redraw each letter’s shape, alternating the proportions, but keeping the characters similar.

The type designer experiments with the ligatures. Not bad. Keeping at it.

Asking our illustrators to draw some animals and patterns. Trying to fit the images in in different ways.

Playing with the images.

Intending to bring up each letter’s expressiveness while trying not to overdo it, so that all characters are visually uniform.

Throwing a set of small caps in.

Adding the ligatures and ornaments.

For instance, letter “O” can be easily replaced by a raspberry image.