Marianne Seregi at National Geographic asked me if I could make a “more compressed version of Marden” for a special Earth Day issue. I used this as an opportunity to add a hyper-condensed member to the comprehensive typeface collection that I had been developing for them. We had a pretty tight deadline so I drew the typeface more or less to fit the page layouts as they were being designed. We were working so fast that we never even had time to come up with a name for the typeface, so the beta version name, “Marden Very Condensed,” stuck and it became a standard part of their typographic palette going forward.
