A self-proclaimed “type dork,” Ellen Luff is a graphic designer, artist, and typographer with “a head full of ideas and hands desperate to make.”
Born in England but traveling the world as much as she can, Ellen works as a freelancer, although her career began in the advertising world. Many creatives don’t fare well working under the constraints of a 9 to 5 job in a stuffy office, and eventually, Ellen left that world behind in favor of “running into the sunset” and using her travels to inspire her work.
With “a passion for beautiful design and burning belief that good design matters,” Ellen has crafted several incredibly versatile type families. One of her more recent releases through YouWorkForThem is Larken, a sophisticated serif type family “designed to reflect nature.”
Designed by Ellen Luff and Tom Watkins, Larken “creates a sense of natural softness and expressiveness,” melding organic curves and gentle repetition into a powerful and harmonious type family.
“We pushed the concept into a usability-focused direction,” they explained, adding that Larken “works as a bold tool and beautiful communicator.”
The natural curves, swells, and sloping trunks only expand in character as the font grows in weight, although the lighter weights have lower contrast and some optical corrections that create a warm and gentle appearance. Ellen and Tom’s attention to detail with this font family ensures that it will work equally well in both display and text applications.
Larken is available in Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, ExtraBold, and Black, with corresponding true italics for each weight. For designers who use software and platforms that support variable fonts, Larken offers a Variable version for both its upright and italic forms, providing the complete range of weights in one place.
The range of weights available in the Larken type family makes it perfectly suited to everything from displays and signage to headlines, subheadings, editorials, print and digital publishing, advertising, logos, product packaging, merchandise, marketing materials, website designs, and mobile applications. It’s a beautiful choice for branding and identity projects that need a strong serif that offers plenty of versatility across multiple media types and sizes.
Larken offers additional flexibility through OpenType features that include case-sensitive forms, fractions, discretionary ligatures, standard ligatures, and stylistic alternates. It extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Baltic, Central European, and Pan African Latin languages for design projects intended for an international audience.
Ellen Luff currently offers nine products through YouWorkForThem, a variety of serif, sans serif, and hand-painted type designs. If you use software that supports them, she also offers a selection of variable and SVG fonts you won’t want to miss! Visit her portfolio to take a look at the rest of her work and bookmark it so you can check back for new releases as time goes on!
