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.
Adapter follows a number of successful multi-script font releases including Skolar™, Skolar Sans, and Nassim and collaborations with global clients such as the BBC, LG, and Google. Adapter already supports languages using Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Greek scripts. Adapter’s language skills keep on growing with the new Arabic script extension released today. This will amount to over 330 languages used by approximately 3.54 billion speakers* around the globe. Rosetta’s long-term goal is to extend Adapter to support languages of Africa, Georgia, Armenia, Thailand, as well as the many Indian 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.
Adapter’s type system can be adjusted freely across three dimensions to modify weight, italic slant, and optical size between text and display variants. Adapter Text delivers a good reading experience even in low-resolution and small type sizes thanks to generous spacing, overall openness, and slightly squarish counters. Adapter Display is tightly spaced for a striking impact in headlines across a wider range of weight styles, from thin to black.
Utilizing the new OpenType Variable font technology, Rosetta managed to pack all of this potential into a single font with a tiny data footprint. Dramatically increased stylistic and linguistic options with little extra file size mean that websites and apps can easily provide fast service to a larger number of customers reading in a range of the world’s languages.
(*) This estimate is based on a sum of the native speakers of the languages.
P.S. If you want to know more about the details of Adapter design, find us on Twitter or Instagram where we have already posted numerous previews. You can also read our previous post about the making of Adapter
