Responses by Laura Worthington, typeface designer, Laura Worthington Design

Background: This website was a complete redesign of my previous website; its purpose is to display and sell licenses for all of my typefaces, and provide information, resources, educational articles and news for my current and prospective customers. The target audience is designers who are interested in licensing display typefaces that are feature-rich and offer a plethora of options for customization.

Highlights: Joe Newton from Anderson Newton Design designed the vast majority of my promotional images and type specimens—he’s created the core of my brand identity and was able to cull all of that imagery into one cohesive look for the site. The colors, decorative elements—all of which came from my fonts—and composition reflect the past eight years of design.

Navigational structure: I have a large library, consisting of over 200 fonts residing within families and collections. The collections are what complicated matters with the navigation. My typeface collections consist of sans, serif, script, display and decorative fonts. We wondered if we should list, for example, the script fonts within a collection twice—within the collection and as a standalone within the script category? And if so, do we show it in context of the collection or by itself? We decided on the latter solution.

Time constraints: This was a new design to replace an existing site that was fully functional. As such, I wanted to allow for as much time as necessary for full creativity, exploration and iterations to make it the best it could be.

Technical features: Developer Chris Lewis chose to build the site with Craft CMS—it has exceptional back end tools that are easy to work with and allows full customization. Also, the Type Tester is fully functional and operates similarly to the type tools you’d find in high-end design programs. Users can highlight a glyph and view all of its swashes and alternates, enabling them to fully stylize their text in the browser. Also, if they have purchased a license for the font and have it installed in their OS, they can copy and paste their stylized text from the browser into their design program. This is important for users working with a design program that is lacking full typographic tools, such as a glyphs panel.