The design of Adapter started with a goal shared by many other designers: to create a simple, no-frills sans serif that would appeal to contemporary modernist and post-modernist aesthetics. A straightforward, universal typeface that is easy to use for a wide range of design genres.
We found that modernist sans serifs (or neo-grotesques such as Helvetica or Arial) tend to be used according to two different logics. They are an unobtrusive, basic, or even default choice when used for continuous texts. Yet they can also be selected intentionally to make a strong stylistic statement suggesting minimalism or unaesthetics when used in posters, magazines, or book covers. These are two very different objectives, and we argue they are best addressed with different shapes. That’s why we designed two different typefaces with two different design personalities.
Adapter Text looks as if it were designed by a typographer who cares mostly about ergonomics, ease of reading, and an even rhythm. Emphasized design features, generous spacing, overall openness, and slightly squarish counters that lend themselves well to low resolutions were all made to honour the reading experience.
Adapter Display, on the other hand, was designed by an architect – a lover of symmetry, alignment, impact, and black colour. Its round shapes are rounder and its spiky parts, spikier. It remains casually uninvolved, but it has personality. It is tightly spaced for a striking impact in headlines. The display sizes also permit a wider range of usable weights.
Parts of the same system, Adapter Display and Adapter Text were two separate sets of fonts. But we wanted to keep the system compact. So, we packed the whole range of weights, text and display size-specific variants, and even the italics into a single, lightweight variable font. Adapter currently supports Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. A simple, flexible solution.
Adapter™ World is a design programme involving an international team of designers and consultants who work with Rosetta type foundry to provide a modern, coherent, and reliable design for a wide range of the world’s languages.
Providing typefaces that are visually harmonized across diverse language contexts is no small feat as different languages and cultural environments pose many design challenges. For example, the aesthetics of the Latin script may not easily be translated to Arabic or Hebrew environments. This is a challenge that lies far beyond the abilities of an individual designer. Thus, Rosetta always works collaboratively, employing specialized consultants. The goal is to deliver fonts that are both visually pleasing and culturally valid. The quality of Adapter Cyrillic has already been recognized in the respected Modern Cyrillic 2019 competition.
Art-direction:
William Montrose,
David Březina
Design:
William Montrose (Latin),
Sláva Jevčinová (Cyrillic, Greek, Latin)
Published: 2019
Language support:
Variable font axes:
Optical size (opsz): 4 to 18
Weight (wght): 100 to 900
Slant (slnt): −10 to 0
Adapter is a trade mark of Rosetta Type Foundry s.r.o.
William Montrose is a type designer with a background in marketing and advertising. His interest in typography led him to Berlin (FontShop International), Reading (MA Typeface Design) and London (Dalton Maag).
William worked on custom and retail typefaces and marketing at Rosetta. He is now a partner in an independent project Kilotype.
Sláva Jevčinová is a type and graphic designer from Slovakia. She holds an MA in type design from the Type and Media programme at The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague as well as an MA in graphic design from J. E. Purkyně University in Czech Republic. After an internship at Mota Italic in Berlin she specialised in TrueType hinting at Fontwerk. She has been working independently since 2013 and regularly collaborates with Rosetta as hinting specialist and type designer.
David Březina is the managing director at Rosetta. While you may know him as the designer of the award-winning type family Skolar, he has also worked on custom typefaces for Adobe, Linotype (Monotype), Microsoft, Google, and others. So far, he has designed typefaces for Cyrillic, Greek, Gujarati, Devanagari, and various extensions of Latin. David holds a Master’s degree in computer science from Masaryk University in Brno (Czechia) and an MA in Typeface Design and PhD from the University of Reading (UK). His cross-disciplinary PhD thesis studied visual similarity and coherence of characters in typefaces for continuous reading in Latin, Cyrillic, and Devanagari scripts.
He has also been actively involved in writing, presenting, and conducting workshops on type and typography around the world.
| Font engineering : | Johannes Neumeier |
|---|---|
| Kerning : | Jitka Janečková |
| Cyrillic consultancy : | Maria Doreuli |
| Greek consultancy : | Irene Vlachou |
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