MAD Sans is the blue collar workhorse of the MAD font family. It was built up from skeleton forms of found AutoCAD material, which became the structure of the Light weights. The family was then expanded with Regular and Bold weights with matching Italics using the Light weights as a framework for the expansion.

Following these ‘Open’ weights, a Fill version became established, opening up another interesting side to the family. It has an air of familiarity mixed with a certain roughness that works in both larger and smaller sizes.

During his time at the Werkplaats Typografie, Dries was among CAD drawings and a fascination for these program’s inherent typeface arose. These two type families are a reinterpretation that tries to make the most of their grid-based nature — they are a tribute to historical and forgotten form.

MAD is an acronym for Machine Aided Design, a direct reference to CAD (Computer-Aided Design), which reveals the typeface’s starting point. Since early printing of CAD plans were done with plotters that drew every single line of the instruction, special typefaces had to be designed for the dimensions and other information. These were constructed out of lines and not outlines of shapes. With their rendering dictated by the resolution of the output device, their final form was not fixed.