DDB Tribal Düsseldorf
BIC - THE UNIVERSAL TYPEFACE EXPERIMENT
Typography meets typology in this handsome experiment that harnesses the world’s handwriting to bring about a global average. In celebration of the most popular pen in history, DDB Tribal Düsseldorf set out to create a typeface that could be considered as universal as BIC’s world-famous Cristal ballpoint pen. The idea was to crowdsource handwriting contributions from around the world and combine them into a single typeface that could be explored through various demographics. Our pretty experiment managed to crowdsource more than a million contributions in less than a month and continues to evolve as more and more people take up the pen to join in.
Typography Meets Typology
With more than 100 billion pens produced since 1950, BIC has been dubbed the maker of ‘the universal pen’. Inspired by this notion, DDB Tribal Düsseldorf enlisted MediaMonks to design a platform that would produce an answer to the question of what a ‘universal handwriting’ would look like. The platform had to be able to garner handwritings en masse and compute them on the spot into an ever-evolving typeface. Our average-calculating algorithm had to be lightweight in order to process contributions effectively but elaborate enough to ostracize phallic freestyling and the like.
Users could 'physically' contribute their letters via their smartphone touchscreens. This enabled users to write in an intuitive way whilst leaving plenty of space on the desktop site to explore the intricacies of the demographical data that was collected as part of the experiment. More than a million contributions inspired a whole subset of typefaces that revealed the differences in handwriting between demographics such as males and females, righties and lefties, and different age groups or nationalities.
Crowdsourced Success
Within days of being set loose, the Web went wild for BIC’s clever crowdsourcing quest. Quicker than a marketer could say ‘media buy’, people from over 125 countries joined in on the experiment by contributing their characters and credentials. The campaign gained further traction from major news outlets, with (unsponsored) coverage from The Verge, Wired, Time, NBC and The Huffington Post. The Universal Typeface Experiment has also been awarded by the likes of the Awwwards, Cannes Lions and the FWA.
