The homeless people’s handwritten signs that are being turned into fonts

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/06/17/the-homeless-peoples-handwritten-signs-that-are-being-turned-into-fonts/



A new charity project in Barcelona takes signs made by the city’s rough sleepers and turns their handwriting into a downloadable font

The homeless people’s handwritten signs that are being turned into fonts
By Jon Henley, The Guardian
Tuesday, June 17, 2014 18:33 EDT

Writing the cardboard sign you use to beg, says Guillermo, one of Barcelona’s estimated 3,000 homeless people, is just “really shitty. You’re hardly going to convey love. You can’t convey anything nice. What you’re conveying through the cardboard, through your writing, is something that’s really … screwing you.”

But the handwriting of some of the Catalan capital’s rough sleepers is now being put to a wider use than helping its individual authors survive: scanned and converted into downloadable fonts, it is being sold online to raise funds for a foundation that supports homeless people in their effort to leave the street behind.

Homelessfonts.org, a joint venture between the Arrels Foundation, which works with nearly half of Barcelona’s homeless population, and advertising agency The Cyranos McCann, hopes individuals and companies will buy the fonts and use them to communicate on social media or as part of their corporate identity on stationery and packaging.

Using the typefaces homeless people themselves use to call attention to themselves in the street – from rough, energetic and sometimes barely legible scrawls to sometimes beautifully executed near-calligraphy – is “a creative way to raise awareness and transform the popular view of the homelessness issue,” says Ferran Busquets, the foundation’s director.

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http://www.homelessfonts.org/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124737378@N03/

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Great idea!