Major League Soccer
America’s top football league needed a versatile font that worked across the board, from stadiums to phone screens. MLS Tifo hits the back of the net.
Variable super-family
We picked F37® because of their track record in the typography world which we have long admired. Their ability to interpret our needs and translate that into compelling design was clear from the very start. The work fits the tone of our brand, culturally fluid, progressive and modern. They pushed our thinking throughout this process, expanding what we thought was possible.
David Bruce — Vice President of Brand, MLS
MLS Headline
Animation
MLS Standard
Background
MLS is the top tier of men’s football (soccer) in the United States. Established in 1993, it’s currently the world’s seventh-ranked professional football league and is steadily growing in stature and popularity home and away.
Kicking on from our work creating a new shirt name and number font for MLS's 25 year anniversary in 2020, we were approached by MLS to design a versatile font family that could work hard in any position on the park.
MLS needed a font to call their own. Something distinctive and ownable. Up until then, they’d been using an off-the-shelf font, DIN Next Pro, which didn’t have the impact or flexibility they were after. We were charged with designing a true superfamily.
MLS Sans
MLS Headline
Hierarchy
Delivery
We already had a relationship with the client and a deep knowledge of football typography through our research for two football type books. Using the MLS crest as a starting point, we began the gargantuan task of creating the MLS Tifo super family.
MLS Tifo is a neo-Grotesque font made up of three sub-families (Headline, Standard and Micro) that can go from quiet to loud and works equally well in print and on screen. We’ve developed weights from Light to Extra Bold, widths of Regular to Wide and optical sizes ranging from text to headlines.
We created MLS Tifo as a fully variable font. This means that with flexible web development MLS Tifo can tweak its four parameters in real time to look super-crisp at small sizes or punchy at large sizes (depending on screen size and font size). And because it’s just a single file, rather than 30, loading times are really quick and responsive.
