Catalogs & Manuals
User Guides &
Type Specimens
PROJECT
Adorn Collection
Charcuterie Collection
CLIENT
Laura Worthington Design
DESIGN & ART DIRECTION
LAYOUT & TYPESETTING
WHO
Laura Worthington is a prolific state-of-the-art type designer specializing in script typefaces and ornamentation designed based on her diverse lettering styles. She is also a remarkable human being and a dear friend.
She enhances her fonts with a wealth of alternate forms, one of the hallmarks of her high-quality designs.
WHAT
The richness and complexity of her fonts require comprehensive guides for the users to make the best of these digital assets.
WHY
For many years, Erica-May Chan was the designer behind these thoughtfully detailed guides. However, when Erica moved to pursue other projects, Laura contacted me to take over her role.
As I stepped in to pick up from where Erica left off, I noticed that while Laura's website's visual identity evolved under the art direction of Joe Newton, her User Guides style was out of sync with this new branding.
HOW
This became the starting point of a successful exchange of files and recommendations between Laura, Joe, and me that led to the development of a new visual system for the User Guides illustrated here.
My first focus was establishing a consistent visual system across the User Guides, including typography, color palettes, logotypes, and decorative elements. Ornamentation strings framed Laura's icon and signature as headers on the covers and as footers on the interior pages. As in her website, Congenial became the text face across all the guides. To convey a modern, clean, and inviting experience in the interior, I designed the headers in a minimalistic functional way, choosing asymmetrical alignments when appropriate and keeping many clear breathing areas along the way. Although all the guides have a shared design framework, each collection includes secondary color palettes linked to the font specimens they illustrate.
WHAT'S NEXT
After laying the ground with baseline projects for future font releases, I was ready to ramp up the production for Laura's extensive catalog, starting with Adorn Collection. For that endeavor, I brought in my seasoned design partners from Estúdio Versalete, who, under my art direction, began cracking down and implementing the new visual system across Laura's catalog.
This page is a sample of the first outcomes of this ongoing project. Check out for future updates.
Samples of covers that integrate the Adorn Collection
Samples from interior pages of Adorn Collection (full guide is 174 pages).
A sample from Laura Worthington's Design website page.
Detail of a header and detail of the footer from interior pages of the User's Guides.
Samples from interior pages of Adorn Collection (full guide is 174 pages).