Helping letter by letter. The Type Design Project „Homeless Fonts“
There are more than 3,000 homeless living on the streets of Barcelona. Of course each of them is a unique character, as it counts for each person in this world. Being one in a million makes us yet being one of a kind.A persons handwriting is unique and therefore the most significant part of our identity within society.
A handful of Barcelona´s homeless people are now part of a project, which helps to benefit from their unique handwriting and turns it into a business opportunity. This innovative Type- Design project is called Homeless Fonts.
The whole thing was initiated by the Arrels Foundation in collaboration with the advertising agency The Cyranos Mc Cann, who made up the advantage of handwriting uniqueness and are helping the homeless to help themselves. For this purpose, the initiators first photographed numerous self made cardboard signs in the streets of Barcelona, selected initially five of them and invited the chosen ones to the studio absolving a typography workshop. The letters created in the workshop were digitized and converted to vector graphics. These fonts are now available for download on the page homelessfont.org .
Et Voilà, what started on a cardboard with sentences begging for help, turned out to be a new designed font for the creative industry.
Designers, agencies and brands can use it for individual packaging design or for their labels.
Loraine´s font already found its way onto the label of a local wine bottle dealer.
Loraine, homelessfonts.org, 2014
The prices of a font family are depending on private or business usage. For the private use the rate is about 20, -€ and for business use you pay 300, -€. The proceeds of the purchase will go to the Arrels Foundation, which is known in the streets of Barcelona for its very engaged outreach work. Every week, Arrels’ team walks through different areas of Barcelona to get to know people who are living on the streets. Little by little, trustful bonds are created and needs are detected. In 2012, 478 people attended. The workers help the homeless with paper work, legal issues, doctor visits, emergency night accommodation, participating in the „operation cold“ and they try to raise awareness amongst the public about the triggering factors of becoming homeless.
Website Homeless Fonts
You are a Typographer and want to contribute? You can do that here