This typeface is crowdsourced from thousands of handwritten characters

Pen maker Bic has commissioned a German ad agency to create the “Universal Typeface Experiment,“ which is in the process of collecting handwritten letters of the Latin alphabet from anyone who’s willing to draw them. The end result will be a downloadable font that represents the average of everyone’s contributions — but in the meantime, you can browse the letters that people have already drawn on the project’s site, broken down by a variety of demographics: industry, gender, handedness, and so on. So far, the average letters look pretty normal — not perfect, but relatively straight block characters that could pass for the real handwriting of someone who’s very careful with their strokes.

Look for the font download to be made available in August.