2015 TypeCon Crowdsourced Font

description:

While at TypeCon 2015, I had the unoriginal idea of crowdsourcing a font. After gathering a decent following through live-Tweets of the event, I asked people to meet me in the back of the presentation hall to sketch out a character on my Surface Pro 3. This is the resulting font—after some light edits.

date:

August, 2015

work:

Type design

Participants

As an unknown in the type community, it took me quite an effort to gather participants for this project. I started asking people that I'd chatted with and Tweeting at people who followed me. After a while, I felt approached some of the bigger names in the room—John Downer, among them—knowing that their names on the list would help sway the holdouts.

By the end of the weekend, authors, type designers, typographers, and educators all participated and filled out the character set below.

Optimization

When I arrived home in Virginia, I brought the font into FontLab Studio 5 and made sure all had relatively similar x-, cap, ascender, and descender heights. By the end, we had a pretty crazy typeface.

Download the font.