Working with F37\u2019s Ryan Williamson on the production of the font, the typeface spans three eras of Harriet\u2019s writing life: ages four, 13 and 30 years old. The glyphs are an amalgamation of her diary scribblings, which, when included in the typeface, become a an archival project of not only Harriet\u2019s stylistic habits but also of the time of writing \u2013 there\u2019s no hashtags or @\u2019s to be found in thes early texts. In her teenage writing, there\u2019s an angsty urgency through the heavy \u201cpressing-too-hard\u201d handwriting of someone desperate to prove something \u2013 and this shines through in F37\u2019s translation of the graphite blitz that takes place in adolescent tell-alls. \u201cThis process made me acutely aware of how much we perform even in something as ordinary as handwriting,\u201d says Harriet. \u201cI found myself dissecting everything: past and present selves, the unconscious choices I was making, and the question of who exactly I was performing for.\u201d<\/p>\n
Details mean a lot to Harriet, so she veered into diva-esque demands: there must be penis and vagina glyphs (use those in your corporate projects), there had to be at least five variations of em dashes in her age 30 set and certain words that she writes most often must appear in one very particular form. For example, when you type one of Harriet\u2019s fourteen exes\u2019 names, they automatically switch to how she would have written it at the time. \u201cI\u2019m unsure if there\u2019s a proper typographic industry term for this, but I call it \u2018auto-yearn\u2019,\u201d says Harriet.<\/p>\n
Instead of traditional weights, the typeface holds multiple alternates to keep it natural and flexible in order to avoid it looking like \u201cfake childlike writing\u201d \u2013 it\u2019s real, messy and lived-in. When researching her handwriting, Harriet came across a crucial piece of childhood ephemera \u2013 a conversation between herself at different ages. \u201cIt reminded me that we\u2019re never just who we are in the present. We\u2019re layered, carrying every earlier version of ourselves,\u201d says Harriet. \u201cThe evolution of (and even conversations between) the handwriting is such a pure way to capture that. As if to prove the point, the typeface launched on the day I turned 30 \u2013 another version of me folded into the work.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Working with F37\u2019s Ryan Williamson on the production of the font, the typeface spans three eras of Harriet\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224316,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-224315","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}