What can be more lovely than a wedding, an intimate invitation, a gift from the heart? One whose presentation uses the warm and welcoming family of typefaces, Adorn. With a modern and sometimes quirky twist on the staid, almost corporate look of formal invitations, this family of lettering typefaces arms designers with a breathtakingly large number of faces that work harmoniously, despite the distinctiveness of each. Even larger and more multilayered than Worthington’s award-winning Charcuterie collection, Adorn offers seven display fonts, four script designs, monograms, ornaments, illustrations, banners, frames, and catchwords.
Anyone in the business of helping others celebrate life—florists, menu designers, landscapers, caterers, tailors, event planners—will find fitting fonts in the Adorn collection. DIYers and designers will enjoy Adorn, too, for use in prints and drawings, quotes, invitations for gatherings, greeting cards, baby showers, gift cards, even wine bottles.
While each font in the carefully orchestrated Adorn collection can stand alone, the particular combination of contrasting scripts, display fonts, romans, and the multitude of stylized fonts in Adorn’s extraordinary toolkit makes each designer’s creation one of a kind.
MONOGRAMS The jewel in the crown of this collection may be the three monogram design styles: Adorn Solo for one letter, Adorn Duo for a pair, and Adorn Trio for the classic three-letter monogram. Simply type in the lowercase letters and your monogram is finished.
Solo is fresh and airy; Duo is more calligraphic, blossoming before your eyes; Trio is denser, with the center letter carrying a hint of art nouveau. Graphic designers will have their own uses for these; DIYers will see a takeoff point for jewelry, cards, invitations, rubber stamps—an endless source for personalizing and elevating the everyday, the special gathering, or a handmade creation.
CATCHWORDS, BANNERS, FRAMES, AND ORNAMENTS Adorn offers four noteworthy “extra” fonts, though the creative professional will find them anything but superfluous: catchwords, banners, frames, and ornaments.
Twenty Adorn Catchwords, all custom hand-lettered using a fountain pen calligraphic technique, provide a stunning way to display frequently used words to connect factual information or simply to bridge the gap between a lavish script and a hard-working display font.
Twenty Adorn Banners, each with a mirrored image left and right element, are available, with a customized center that can be expanded to encapsulate a message or heading of any width. Adorn Frames is a highly customizable set of elements offering a multitude of approaches to creating frames of any width, height, and style. Use it for corner elements, borders, or to make an actual frame. Adorn Frames features twenty corner elements and nine sets of top, bottom, and side pieces, along with a detailed description in the User’s Guide on how to construct the frames.
In keeping with the spirit of the collection, Adorn Ornaments gift the designer with 130 unique ornamental illustrations. From works inspired by nature, to stunning wreaths, embellishments, rules, and iconic wedding symbols, Adorn Ornaments are meant to accompany the scripts, rather than restricting them to a theme.
SCRIPT TYPEFACES Adorn’s script typefaces, using modern lettering with a cursive impression, are Coronet, Pomander, Garland, and Bouquet. Their common origins—the fountain pen and a singular design aesthetic—give them a cohesive look, one that carries the warmth of the human hand.
Adorn Coronet’s script face exemplifies the Adorn spirit of both modernizing and personalizing typefaces. It’s crisp, angular, and straightforward; it adds a snappy yet subtle edginess, even a slight sense of masculinity, to a design. With 268 swashes and alternate letterforms.
The script face, Adorn Pomander, is a whimsical butterfly of a font: light and airy. The uppercase letters, especially, break the rules of traditional classic calligraphy. With 390 swashes and alternate letterforms. Adorn Garland is a script face that runs along a different, and somewhat “vintage” direction. Rather than deriving its strength from a heavy skeleton or structure, it uses its sense of contrast, its light touch upon the page, and its elongation to provide a visual break – it can function as a long string, rule, or dividing line. With 166 alternate letterforms.
At the other end of the spectrum is the naiveté and giddiness of Adorn Bouquet. It is intentionally irregular, created with a practiced hand to communicate joy—uncontrolled and informal. With 240 alternate letterforms.
ADORN SANS DISPLAY FONTS Of all the fonts in the Adorn Collection, Adorn Sans Condensed may be the most easily identified as bucking the template-derived wedding trend, given its modernity and informality. Brimming with whimsy and the eccentricities of the human touch, Condensed Sans also has contextual alternates with ambicase letters—a distinctive feature not usually found in display fonts.
Like its sister font, Adorn Sans Expanded is a display font with warmth and hand wrought charm that works as an elegant replacement for formal type. Use Sans Expanded in a very small font, loosely tracked, and its personality sings.
ADORN SERIF DISPLAY FONTS Adorn Copperplate has the sturdiness of the classic copperplates, and continues their rich traditional sense of practicality and familiarity—yet with a more modern take. Trendy on wedding invitations, they are all too often heavy-handed. Adorn Copperplate is pretty and structural at once, with tiny surprises poking out: a delicate leg here, a slim stroke there.
Adorn Engraved and Adorn Engraved Expanded are strongly reminiscent of formal invitations popular in the past. Still, the sweet tail of the Q and the irregular qualities of the lines bring it into the twenty-first century. Adorn Engraved Expanded, especially, accentuates the decorative look of the engraved font; the incisions within the stems and serifs allow the designer to use color to enliven them.
Adorn Slab Serif is available in Regular and Bold weights. Though these display fonts can also be used for body text, their uppercase mode shines, adding texture and style to a message. They are perhaps more masculine in style than many of the other typefaces, with a touch of “retro,”—an historic reference with a contemporary spin.
ADORN ROMAN Adorn Roman is both a display and text typeface marked by its traditional calligraphic hand. It was created with a chisel-edged calligraphy pen, and even digitized it has the look of what a designer might create with a calligraphic tool.
