Adam Ladd is a graphic designer and typographer based in Cincinnati, Ohio. While he’s worked in the field professionally since 2003, he didn’t really explore type design until 2013 and even then, it was more a hobby than anything else.
At the time, he was working as an art director and designer for multiple magazines, focusing on layout and design. Being involved in publishing and media meant that much of his work involved text – specifically working with headlines, subheadings, cutlines, captions and the like. He began to recognize what kinds of typefaces worked best for different applications and how to design with them. From there, he began to explore and experiment typography on his own and by 2016, more of his time was dedicated to the art of type design.
It wasn’t until 2017 that he became a type designer full time. While it certainly came with its fair share of hard lessons, the talent and experience Adam has gained have been well worth it. One of the greatest challenges has involved dealing with the financial risk associated with no longer receiving a steady paycheck from a company or design agency. Each font he designs will take hours of work before it’s ready to be released – time that he hopes will fruitful later on. Whether a font sells well or doesn’t, he learns something new from each type design he releases.
When Adam designs a letter set, he pays special attention to not only their architecture and structural nuances, but their spacing and kerning. The process is tedious and time consuming, but it’s an important step that cannot be overlooked. Working with spacing more and more has taught him to think about the reader’s experience and how to tell if type is too tight or too loose to ensure a font’s legibility is optimized.
When Adam creates a new type design, he tries to remain focused on what its marketing will look like, linking a font’s personal style with its name and its potential applications so that it tells a story of sorts. He prefers to craft fonts that will fulfill a need in another designer’s workflow, something that will add value to their own projects.
One of Adam’s most recent releases is Gopher, a geometric reverse-contrast sans serif family with a lot of built-in versatility. Gopher carries a unique and rather playful disposition, one that seemingly pops up out of nowhere (kind of like an actual gopher). The contrast is switched around from a typical sans serif style, featuring thin vertical stems and much heavier horizontal strokes. “This approach was the most tricky to design in characters that have diagonal strokes like v and k, but also yielded interesting results,” Adam said of the style.
Gopher is a family of 48 fonts that feature Normal, Text, and Display subfamilies. These variations are marked by the amount of contrast in each, yet they complement one another harmoniously. The Text subfamily features the lowest contrast of the three, enabling it to work well in smaller type settings and for longer blocks of text. The Normal styles offer moderate contrast, and the Display styles amp up the drama with super high contrast for maximum visual impact.
Each of the three subfamilies is available in Hairline, Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, Black, and Heavy, with corresponding italics for each. The range of weights and styles makes Gopher ideal for design projects of all kinds, including branding and identity, logos, advertising, product packaging, book and album covers, posters, magazine layouts, marketing materials, website designs, and more.
Gopher is loaded with additional OpenType Features that include case-sensitive punctuation for all caps, fractions, standard ligatures, discretionary ligatures, slashed zero, subscript, superscript, scientific inferiors, stylistic alternates, and swash for exceptional versatility. Gopher’s multilingual support extends to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Dutch, and Igbo Onwu for design projects aimed at a global market.
Right now through May 8, 2019, Gopher is on sale for a whopping 82% off of its regular price so it’s a fantastic time to add this one to your font collection!
Adam Ladd currently offers 22 products through YouWorkForThem, a range of serifs, sans serifs, scripts, and display fonts to suit a wide variety of design projects and themes. Visit his portfolio to check out the rest of his work and bookmark it so you can check back often for new releases!
