Born in England and traveling the world in search of inspiration, Ellen Luff is a multidisciplinary creator who is passionate about type design and all it entails. “My passion is turning what I see into typography, photography, and travel writing,” she explained.
While she works as a freelancer these days, she began her career working in advertising. For a creative free spirit, however, a 9-5 office role isn’t always the best route to follow in the long term. The “self-confessed type dork” left the corporate world in favor of blazing her own trail — in typography and around the world.
“I’ve got a head full of ideas and hands desperate to make, designing anything and everything,” she said. Ellen feels that she was “born to get my hands dirty crafting and creating,” and that’s exactly what she does.
As a type designer, she loves “beautifully crafted characters, finding perfect combinations and watching them at work in gorgeous designs.” Her own body of work speaks to such artistry, like one of our favorite designs, Athena.
Athena is an elegant typeface that embraces contrast for a sophisticated and dramatic visual flair. Offering a modern take on the didone genre while freeing itself from the serifs typically associated with them, it confidently plays with the extremes between thick strokes and whisper-thin curves.
“It’s a careful collaboration between beauty and function,” Ellen explained. “This type family has been a real labour of love.”
Athena offers ten weights across three styles for exceptional design versatility.
In its lightest weight, Athena carries minimal contrast and is designed to offer a more subtle sophistication in body copy and large type, working beautifully in logos, advertising, magazines, invitations, and titling.
For text purposes, Athena Book and Athena Book Italic carry a thicker architecture and subtle contrast designed to provide optimal legibility and a more comfortable reading experience in print and digital publishing applications.
When it comes to display use, Athena Regular, Athena Bold, and Athena Inline provide corresponding italics and were designed to be visually striking and elegant in use. These high-contrast character sets exude confidence and look their best in really large sizes, working well in headlines, fashion spreads, magazines, titling, posters, and more.
The entire Athena family is beautifully suited to branding and identity projects that need an elegant sans serif with a lot of style and personal flair. They work well on their own but were also crafted to work harmoniously together.
Athena features upper and lowercase characters and supports all Latin-based languages, extending multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Vietnamese, Pan African Latin, Pinyin, IPA, Venda, and Igbo Onwu for design projects intended for an international audience.
Right now through December 31, 2020, Athena is on sale for 50% off of its regular price so it’s a fantastic time to add this gorgeous family to your font collection!
Ellen Luff currently offers nine products through YouWorkForThem, a variety of serif, sans serifs, and hand-painted type designs to suit design projects of all kinds. If you use software that supports them, she also offers a selection of variable and SVG fonts, as well. Visit her portfolio to take a look at the rest of her work and bookmark it so you won’t miss out on her new releases in the future!
