Gopher Mono: A Monospaced Reverse Contrast Sans Serif From Adam Ladd
Based in Cincinnati, Adam Ladd is a prolific typographer and graphic designer who has been working in the visual art industry for nearly 20 years. He spent about a decade working as a designer and art director, focusing on the layout and design direction for several magazines.
As anyone who’s worked in layout knows well, fonts play a vital role in the finished appearance and legibility – particularly in headlines and subheadings, captions, and cutlines. There’s an art to balancing form and function and over time, Adam became familiar with which typefaces worked best in specific applications.
As time went on, he started to explore the art of typography through experimentation, although it largely remained a hobby – at least early on.
A few years later, Adam delved into type design full time. Like most things in life, it brought with it a number of hard lessons but the experience he gained – and the skills that accompanied it – made it all worthwhile.
When it comes to approaching a new type design, Adam focuses on not only the architectural variances of the characters, but the spacing and kerning between them. It’s a tedious and time-consuming process to be sure, but such attention to detail means that every type design is crafted with the utmost care.
This is where Adam’s extensive experience working in layout comes into play. The reader’s experience is always first and foremost in his mind, so every type design is optimized to ensure incredible – and comfortable – legibility.
One of his most recent releases through YouWorkForThem is Gopher Mono, a monospaced variant of Adam’s earlier release, Gopher.
This design is a reverse-contrast sans serif family that carries the same playful and unique personality as its older sibling, blending impeccable style with versatile function. Monospaced type designs are often used for smaller body text, however, Gopher Mono’s “slightly unusual quirks” make it an interesting choice for larger blocks of text and displays.
Where Gopher carries itself with a slightly wider stance, Gopher Mono stands with a bit more of a vertical stature, making the most of limited horizontal space. That said, Gopher Mono pairs well with Gopher, providing a complete type family with varying degrees of reverse contrast.
Gopher Mono is available in Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold, ExtraBold, and Black, with corresponding italics for each. This range of weights makes it well suited to everything from displays and signage, to advertisements, logos, product packaging, merchandise, apparel, marketing materials, book covers and publishing applications, magazine layouts, website designs, mobile applications, branding, and identity projects.
Additional flexibility is provided through OpenType and includes case-sensitive forms, fractions, ordinals, subscript, superscript, scientific inferiors, slashed zero, and stylistic alternates. Gopher Mono extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Dutch, and Igbo Onwu for graphic designs intended for an international audience.
Adam Ladd currently offers 32 products through YouWorkForThem, a range of serifs, sans serifs, scripts, and display fonts that are well suited to design projects of all kinds. Visit his portfolio to take a look at the rest of his work and if you love what you see, bookmark it so you can check back for new additions!
