I'm a big fan of Fairtrade. Paying and treating people fairly seems to be a much better standard to strive for than Organic, which always seems absolute bollocks to me.
Anyhow. It's Fairtrade Fortnight this week, which reminds me to write a post I've been meaning to write for the last 12 months in praise of the Fairtrade font.
Dan and Ray from w+k are the Creative Directors on the Fairtrade account. About a year ago, the people from the Guardian used to sit next to the Fairtrade people. When I was in I kept seeing gorgeous letter forms pinned up on the wall. This evolved into this typeface.
I'm sure you'll have seen that around.
Dan and Ray went to St Vincent to meet and talk to Fairtrade farmers and whilst there were struck by all the hand drawn type and the vibrant colours.
Gorgeous aren't they?
So they set to work with KJ, a designer at w+k, to try and create a font that captured that spirit. What they came up with is a series of letterforms cut by Paul Sharps and made into a proper font by Atomic. The stuff you see up there is actually based on three different fonts and works as a normal font, so anyone can use it for marketing materials or power point presentations or anything. Just type away. It's not a series of vectors. It's a font.
It's acted as glue that holds Fairtrade's comms together and it makes dry stats look interesting and engaging.
Really good isn't it? I love it. It's smart, fun, appropriate and well crafted. Lovely.
By the way, there is loads of stuff you can do to support Fairtrade during Fairtrade Fortnight find out more here.
It's as if the font is also displaying Fairtrade's advocacies. Now that you mentioned it, this font can be used for websites that are centered to things like social awareness, responsibility, and other advocacies for public welfare. The hand-drawn signages look beautiful, too.
Posted by: Kathryn McDwell | May 12, 2011 at 22:37