David Bowie and John Lennon Handwriting Turned Into Fonts
A series of downloadable fonts based on the handwriting of acclaimed songwriters has been released online, and the creators say they hope the software will inspire other artists.
Songwritersfonts.com offers free typefaces based on the handwriting of David Bowie, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Leonard Cohen and Serge Gainsbourg.
“Songwriting is about inspiration,” designers Nicolas Damiens and Julien Sens said on the site. “Write songs as the ones who inspired you before. Writing lyrics with the handwriting of influential songwriters helps imagination to develop. Being in the mood of Bowie, Cobain, Cohen, Gainsbourg, Lennon, might be purely imaginative ... but that's precisely the point.”
Each font, they added, has been been created from each artists’ “original handwritten letters and notes.” They note that the software is “for personal use only.”
In graphology, the study of handwriting, it’s argued that some signs of a creative nature are signaled by the wide spacing between words, characters slanting to the right (in right-handed people), rounded letters, wide loops in the letter “l” and the dot in “i” high above the stalk and sometimes circled.
In 2013, Smithsonian.com reported on an exhibition of American artists’ handwriting. “The painter Charles E. Burchfield once said of handwriting, ‘Let the mind rule the writing not the eye … someone will decipher your hieroglyphics,’" they note, "Whether impeccable cursive or illegible chicken scratch, an artist’s ‘hand’ is never far from hieroglyphic. It is distinctive, expressive of the artist’s individuality -- an art form in and of itself.”