Midnight Sans was initially drawn for Gary Green’s ‘When Midnight Comes Around’, published by our friends at STANLEY/BARKER in 2020. The Condensed-only style embodied a warm but idiosyncratic flavour: a reflection of the publication’s photographs, which document the burgeoning downtown alternative music scene of 1970s New York City.

Developing Midnight into further widths, the type family began to emulate qualities found elsewhere in the variegated visual legacies of underground car culture, 1990s nostalgia, and DIY rave flyers. For example, the counter of the letter ‘O’ in the condensed style 12 Black subsequently tweens through the type family’s five widths to become elongated in the most expanded style, 60 Black. These changes in form allowed for the typeface to be drawn with variability in mind, enabling both freedom and constraint in equal measures. The details found in the expanded widths of Midnight Sans evoke qualities of Aldo Novarese’s Eurostile (1962), but behave more like cousins or second cousins as the width of the type fluctuates.

Midnight Sans is available in a single weight — Black — across five widths, from Condensed (12 Black) to Expanded (60 Black), over two families — Midnight Sans RD, a chamfered variant; and Midnight Sans ST, a straight variant. It is open to licensing in both Standard (‘STD’) and Professional (‘PRO’) versions. The latter contains numerous OpenType features and stylistic alternates.