Would you like to be able to write using Albert Einstein’s handwriting? How about Sigmund Freud? Well now you can thanks to Harald Geisler and Elizabeth Waterhouse.
Why do we need even more fonts? Aren’t there already enough, you might ask. Well aren’t all of the fonts that we use getting kind of boring? Isn’t it time for something more original?
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The duo have started a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds necessary to perfect new font based on the Einstein’s handwriting.
The Freud campaign came first and has already been completed. Geller worked on that one with R. Keller and they raised $25, 999 from 1, 481 backers to create it.
The site says, “A Letter to your shrink’ is about creating a font based on Sigmund Freud’s handwritten letters.” The font can be yours to use for about $21. In fact, you get 4 different versions of Freud’s handwriting.
As the creator explained, “After months of development I finished four alphabets based on Freud’s handwriting. Why four and not just one? When you write a text on your computer every letter looks exactly the same. When you write with your hand, every letter looks a little different.”
The Einstein campaign has already raised $30, 935 from 1, 341. They only needed $15, 000 and that campaign still has 33 days to go.
The duo says that their project honors Einstein’s innovative style of thinking, which was imaginative, rigorous, and playful. The 2015 release also coincides with the centennial of the General Theory of Relativity.
The Albert Einstein font is collaboration between a typographer and a dancer: Harald Geisler, graduate of the University of Art and Design Offenbach in Germany, and Liz Waterhouse, BA Physics from Harvard and former dancer with the Forsythe Company in Frankfurt.
The collaboration began in 2009, over a series of coffees in Frankfurt. Liz remembers looking at a text written in a handwriting font (on her napkin at the coffee shop) and asking Harald if he could design one. The idea to make a “life-like” handwriting font from studying penmanship of innovative thinkers came next.
After six months studying examples of Einstein’s handwriting from documents in the Albert Einstein Archives, Geisler created a working prototype. Working with a digital pen to follow the rhythm of Einstein’s movement on paper, Geisler’s result had a pleasing and strong resemblance to Einstein’s actual handwriting.
In 2014 the Einstein Estate accepted the proposal for an Albert Einstein font.