Workhorse | Adrian Tidd — Brand Director & Type Designer

Workhorse is the independent type foundry I built around original typefaces — from the fonts themselves to the brand, specimens, ecommerce, licensing, launches, and customer experience.

Brand stewardship, type design, ecommerce & digital experience
Founder & Type Director

7

Flagship type collections

365+

Direct orders

9

Custom commissions

5

CA / TDC recognitions since 2021

The foundry is deliberately distributed through its own storefront rather than a font marketplace. That means the identity, product presentation, testing experience, licensing language, checkout, fulfillment, and support all have to work as one system.

Typefaces from the catalog have been licensed by organizations including Universal, Louis Vuitton, Progressive, Cole Haan, Princeton, the Utah Jazz, and Harvard, while custom work has ranged from logotypes to proprietary type families.

Designing the product and the store

A typeface is software, but it is purchased visually. The site has to let people understand a family quickly, push it hard enough to see what it can do, and then move through a licensing decision without losing momentum.

Interactive specimens, variable-font demonstrations, responsive type, and detailed family pages make the product itself part of the browsing experience rather than separating the marketing site from the thing being sold.

Direct distribution

Owning the storefront made the less glamorous parts of the system design problems too: licensing tiers, cart behavior, font testing, fulfillment, customer questions, and enterprise purchases.

The objective was to keep those mechanics legible without turning a high-craft product into a transactional software store.

Long-term stewardship

Unlike a client launch, Workhorse never really finishes. Each release has to extend the same brand while giving a new type family enough personality to stand on its own.

The catalog and its presentation have evolved alongside custom commissions, enterprise licensing, and continued recognition from Communication Arts and the Type Directors Club.