Universal Typeface Experiment

» see theuniversaltypeface.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

I did not hear about this at the time. It surfaced for me years later while working through a list of dead web projects, which is a fitting way to find an advertisement that was designed to be temporary and then somehow was not.

Bic launched it on 6 june 2014. The pitch was that the Cristal ballpoint had been in production since 1950 and had passed a hundred billion units, so the company would celebrate by collecting the handwriting of the entire internet and merging it into a single typeface. The concept came out of DDB in Dusseldorf. MediaMonks built the site and wrote the averaging.

You were shown the twenty six capital letters of the Latin alphabet in random order and asked to draw each one, with a finger on a phone screen or with the Cristal Stylus, a pen Bic was selling at the time with a rubber tip on the back end. Every stroke went into the pile. The site then showed you your letters against the running average, and let you filter that average by country, by age, by which hand you wrote with, by the industry you worked in.

Roughly 8,000 people took part on the first day and about 1.7 million characters went in overall. The FWA gave it Site of the Month in july 2014. Then the campaign ended, as campaigns do, and the site kept running for another year and a half on nobody's particular instruction.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it was collected ~

The input device is the joke at the center of the whole thing. This was a tribute to a ballpoint pen that collected no ballpoint writing whatsoever. What it collected was finger-drawing on glass, which is a different motor skill using different muscles, producing letters nobody would recognize as their own handwriting.

The stylus was Bic's attempt to close that gap, and it did not close it. A rubber nub on a capacitive screen has none of the friction a ball on paper has, and friction is most of what gives handwriting its shape. So the archive is genuinely 1.7 million characters of something, just not of the thing the campaign said it was preserving.

~ the average of everyone ~

An average has to throw things away in order to exist. That is not a complaint, it is the definition, and it is the only thing worth saying about a project whose stated goal was to add up the handwriting of the world and divide.

The idiosyncrasies are exactly what cancels out. Your crossed sevens, the loop you put on a lowercase g, the way one letter leans because you were taught by a teacher who leaned: average enough of those against enough other people and you get a smooth, characterless shape belonging to nobody. The demographic filters were the honest part of the design, because slicing by country or by handedness put some of the variance back and let you see that the differences were real before they were flattened.

~ where the font went ~

The typefaces were published for download late in 2014. The site was originally meant to shut down that august once the first downloadable version existed, and instead it sat there, still accepting handwriting, until it went offline at some point around 2016. There was no announcement. Nobody writes a shutdown notice for a campaign microsite, because by then the agency contract has ended and the client has moved to next year's idea.

The fonts survive in Internet Archive captures and are otherwise close to lost. Wikipedia's article on it carries a flag for thin independent sourcing, which is the natural fate of anything whose entire press coverage was generated by a press release. A project about permanence, run as a promotion, lasted about as long as the promotion did.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »