Last Monday 12th of June, Josema Urós from Type-Ø-Tones participated in the Barcelona Design Week, with the occasion of a workshop called Homeless Fonts—Fundació Arrels: “Typefaces that make us visible”

What is ‘Homeless Fonts’?

Homelessfonts is an Arrels Foundation initiative which consists of creating a collection of typefaces based on the handwriting of different homeless people from Barcelona, who agreed to participate in this initiative. The aim is to raise awareness on any potential user of these typefaces: graphic designers and brands. All the benefits of the licensing are used for helping the 1.400 people that are attended by the Foundation with accommodations, food, social and health care.
Some of the fonts were carefully digitized by Josema Urós, who has been collaborating with the Fundació Arrels for a while now, and the other day, at the workshop, he presented the working process. 

The project

Definition and objectives of the project

· Creation of a digital typeface based on a casual handwritten alphabet
· Generation of useful alphabets, but most expressive.
· Composition of a Basic Character Set based on the ASCII 256 (Western Latin/MacOs Roman), to be used for 120 languages. 

The process

1. Analogic creation of an alphabet
· Pangrams writing
· Alphabetical lists A-Z, a-z, 0-9
· Diacritics sequence, punctuation and others
· Less common characters


2. Choosing samples and digitalization

· Selection of samples
· Optimization of the vectorial structure and adaptation of the shapes
· Adjustment of the spacing
· Creation of files suitable for the multiplatform environment.

3. Test and proofing

Case Studies

We will show you the project with some examples

Case 1: José María Erustes