Soon your mundane emails can look like the scrawlings of a genius. A new font based on Albert Einstein’s handwriting is being developed in Germany, in time for the 100th year anniversary of the theory of relativity.
Aided by a thriving Kickstarter campaign, the German typographer Harald Geisler and the Harvard-trained physicist turned dancer Elizabeth Waterhouse are about to embark on the last laborious stages of production for the typeface, a project they started in 2009.
The research for the typeface involved poring over hundreds of pages of manuscripts in Einstein’s archives over the course of six months. With a pen stylus, Geisler traced samples of Einstein’s scrawl over and over again until he developed an intuition and intimacy with the Nobel Prize winner’s script, slant, rhythm and form. “This knowledge provides a foundation that I can improvise on,” Geisler tells Quartz. “This is necessary for the @ sign or the € sign—characters that were not common or had not been invented during the time of Einstein.”
While similar handwriting-based fonts are already commercially available—say of Cézanne, Picasso, Michelangelo, even Barack Obama to name a few—Geisler and Waterhouse are not satisfied with the cookie cutter approach to font-making.
The font is being designed to be compatible with PC, Linux and Mac operating systems and will work on mobile phones and tablets.
Via QUARTZ
