Mada

Try Mada

Weights and styles

• ExtraLight 200Mada ExtraLight
• Light 300Mada Light
• Regular 400Mada Regular
• Medium 500Mada Medium
• SemiBold 600Mada SemiBold
• Bold 700Mada Bold
• ExtraBold 800Mada ExtraBold
• Black 900Mada Black

Mada is a variable font: the download holds the whole weight range in one file, and the named weights above are positions on that range.

About Mada

Mada is a sans serif family for Arabic-script and Latin text. Khaled Hosny drew the Arabic after road signs seen around Cairo: per the official notes it has low descenders, open contours and little stroke contrast, qualities aimed at signage, small sizes and user interfaces, though it can also serve as a display face. The Latin part is a lightly modified version of Source Sans Pro, the Adobe family led by Paul D. Hunt; in the specimen it shows plain, slightly narrow letters with a double-storey a. The family ships as one variable file with a weight axis from 200 to 900 and eight named weights, ExtraLight to Black. There are no italics. It contains 986 glyphs across the Arabic, Latin and Latin Extended character sets and is licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Mada works

Bilingual interfaces

Arabic and Latin share weights from 200 to 900, so a control can switch script without changing its visual weight.

Wayfinding and signs

The Arabic was modelled on road signage, with open contours and short descenders that keep lines of text close together.

Small text on screens

Low stroke contrast and open shapes were chosen, the notes say, for small point sizes.

Headlines in two scripts

ExtraBold and Black give a heading the same heavy colour in Arabic script and in Latin.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Turkish
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Romanian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Estonian

Writing systems with glyphs in the family besides Latin: Arabic. These are listed as scripts, not as a promise for every language written in them.

Character sets found in the files: arabic, latin, latin-ext. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with Mada

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use Mada on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Mada";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Mada-VariableFont_wght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 200 900;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Mada", sans-serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Mada with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Mada:wght@200..900&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

A single variable file

The package holds one file that spans the whole range from ExtraLight to Black. There is no separate italic.

Latin from Source Sans Pro

The copyright notice lists "Source" as a Reserved Font Name, which reflects the origin of the Latin letters.

Scripts covered

Character sets are Arabic, Latin and Latin Extended. Cyrillic and Greek are not included.

FAQs

Collections with Mada

• Fonts for signage and wayfinding

  Sans-serif families developed for signs, road lettering and information displays, readable at a distance and at an angle.

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All sans serif fonts