Free ‘Climate Crisis Font’ Shrinks As The Arctic Ice Caps Melt
Image via Helsingin Sanomat
Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat has teamed up with creative agency TBWA\ Helsinki to design a typeface that aims to raise awareness on climate change.
The Climate Crisis Font, which is available to download for free here, was developed in collaboration with TBWA\ Helsinki’s type designers Eino Korkala and Daniel Coull. It can be adjusted on a scale that corresponds to Arctic sea ice data from 1979 to 2019 and will continue evolving with the IPCC’s forecast until 2050.
The heaviest font weight reflects the state of the Arctic sea ice from back in 1979, and the lightest weight represents IPCC’s 2050 forecast when the sea ice is estimated to shrink to only 30 percent of the readings in 1979.
“Our mission is to make complex matters comprehensible and since seeing is believing we wanted to bolster the conversations on climate change with something concrete and instantly understandable,” Tuomas Jääskeläinen, the art director of Helsingin Sanomat, said. “These kinds of new methods of journalistic storytelling also complement our recent investments in data journalism. Yet, we don’t just want to keep it to ourselves, which is why we are giving it out for free and hope to see it in use elsewhere as well.”
“To leave no room for doubt we used data based on satellite images. This way we were able to create one of the first data-based fonts ever. The OpenType variable font mechanism allowed the design to follow the data perfectly. But we of course wanted to make the font usable for all platforms, so we also created the basic font types with a standard set of font weights,” Juhana Hokkanen, the innovation director of TBWA\Helsinki, explained.
The newspaper recently used The Climate Crisis Font in a collection of articles on climate change and intends to use it in future environmental projects.
Download the typeface here.
Image via Helsingin Sanomat
Image via Helsingin Sanomat
[via TBWA\ Helsinki, images via Helsingin Sanomat]
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