Fonts usually come in several weights: gentle, medium, daring, black. And now, glacial.
Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat has created a free variable font referred to as Climate Crisis. The font has completely different weights that correlate with Arctic sea ice knowledge, visualizing how ice soften has modified over the a long time—and the urgency of the disaster within the current.
The font, designed by Finnish typographer Eino Korkala, has eight completely different weights based mostly on knowledge from the Nationwide Snow and Ice Information Middle (NSIDC) and predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The boldest font represents the yr the NSIDC began satellite tv for pc measurements, in 1979. The thinnest represents the yr 2050. By that point, the crossbar within the A has fully melted away, leaving simply a shell of the unique letterform behind. “Media organizations have a duty for his or her readers to make advanced issues extra understandable,” says Helsingin Sanomat artwork director Tuomas Jääskeläinen. “We hope that utilizing the font helps individuals see the urgency of local weather change in a extra tangible kind.”
Jääskeläinen hopes the font might be a device for information businesses that wish to put further visible emphasis on environmental tales, and an instance of how design can complement the written phrase. Fairly than simply evoking the aesthetics of environmentalism, the font itself is additionally a knowledge visualization.
“Climate disaster is an necessary theme for us as a information media. It is in our curiosity to place emphasis on the written phrase and the photographs accompanying them,” Jääskeläinen says in an e-mail interview. He provides that Helsingin Sanomat is always experimenting with new methods of journalistic story telling, and placing visible emphasis on the font was a contemporary approach to the problem. (See how they utilized the font to their local weather change protection in print and online here.)
Based on Jääskeläinen, the newspaper has acquired widespread curiosity within the font, from america to Japan, and are in talks to make a Cyrillic model to be used in Russia. The font is out there free to download.
