Albert Einstein Font on Kickstarter

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Kickstarter, like other successful crowdsourcing sites, is a weird and wonderful place. I find myself wanting to back projects for wacky inventions and gadgets that fill a need I didn’t even know I had. However, it’s also a great place to find cool things that fit in your everyday life, whether personal or professional. The Albert Einstein Font Kickstarter campaign just might fall into both categories. Dreamed up by dancer Elizabeth Waterhouse and brought to life by typographer Harald Geisler, the font is being created based on the beautiful handwriting of one of the world’s greatest geniuses. Apparently, there is a desire for just such a font, as the project’s $15,000 goal has been fully-funded—more than twice over—in just the first few days of fund-raising.

OriginalAndDigital

Geisler is no stranger to crafting a typeface based on the penmanship of someone famous, having created (and backed via Kickstarter) the Sigmund Freud font in 2013. He carefully details the actual process of creating a font and the extra work that’s involved in duplicating such well-known writing, as well as mimicking the idiosyncrasies of the fluidity of handwriting. To achieve the latter, he has engineered randomization of letter pair connections via angles and strokes. The Albert Einstein font is well into production, with over 400 glyphs already created. For comparison, Geisler’s Freud font has nearly 1500 glyphs, so there is still a lot of work ahead.
AlbertEinsteinFont
Geisler says that one of the font’s key components will be to include more than just the run-of-the-mill set of mathematical and scientific symbols, given that the inspiration behind the font is one of the greatest scientific minds of all time. The genius concept for choosing which symbols to include is that the suggestions will come from backers at the higher levels. Pledge levels start at $15, which gets you a single, personal use copy of the finished font. Other levels include commercial licenses, multi-seat licenses, and extras like Einstein posters and chocolates from Bern! The font is expected to be ready for launch in early 2016 and will be available for Mac, Linux, PC, and iOS devices.

Erica Gamet has been involved in the graphics industry for over 35 years. She is a speaker, writer, trainer, and content creator focusing on Adobe InDesign, Apple Keynote, and varied production topics. She is a regular presenter at CreativePro Week, regular contributor to CreativePro Magazine, and has spoken at Canada’s ebookcraft, Adobe MAX, and Making Design in Oslo, Norway. Find Erica online at the CreativePro YouTube channel, CreativeLive.com and through her own YouTube channel. When she isn’t at her computer she’s probably daydreaming about travel or living in a Nordic noir landscape.

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  • Jaykay says:

    Interesting post Erica. It reminds me of my fav Einstein quote: “If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it research”!

    Also I got to wondering if the font won’t be used to falsify some documents one day as if they were the real thing. Sometimes technology seems to work against be good people.

    • Erica Gamet says:

      I hadn’t heard that Einstein quote…I love it!

      I wouldn’t worry about using the font for nefarious purposes…someone will probably just invent an artificial intelligence to actually convince us it IS Albert Einstein!

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