You too can type in font of wisdom – with digital help
If you could write like Einstein, would it help you to think like Einstein? Quite possibly, says the designer of a digital font that mimics the elegant handwriting of the great physicist.
The Einstein font, the brainchild of Harald Geisler, a German typographer, and Elizabeth Waterhouse, a dancer with a Harvard physics degree, is based on samples of the scientist’s handwriting taken from hundreds of essays, notebooks and letters.
‘‘The fascination we had was whether using Einstein’s script could change your relationship with what you were writing or thinking,’’ Geisler said.
The Einstein font will join others derived from the cursive of luminary figures including Sigmund Freud and Emily Dickinson, as typographers seek to save handwriting from extinction in the digital world of emails, text messages and online social networks.
A fundraising campaign to pay for the development of the font has already garnered more than three times as much money as it set out to. The font could be released by the end of this year, the centenary of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Einstein was ‘‘a thinker with both beautiful ideas and graceful penmanship’’, Waterhouse wrote in an essay about the new font. His handwriting had ‘‘a very round and clear rhythm in time’’, making it an attractive challenge for software automation.
‘‘The idea of genius handwriting that everyone can use is deliberately wonderful and ironic,’’ she said.
Geisler began by analysing Einstein’s handwriting for patterns, marking letters that he thought were typical of the scientist’s style.
‘‘When I started looking at the handwriting, I was searching for movement,’’ he said. ‘‘I have to know how the author moves the pen across the paper.’’
He recorded these patterns in a notebook.
He then digitised the selected letters using a large tablet computer and stylus. This copying also allowed him to become familiar with the handwriting. ‘‘Learning the movement that a writer made to create a letter is essential to creating its digital counterpart,’’ he said.
He later found himself writing shopping lists ‘‘with Einsteinian loops and hoops’’.
Geisler examined the ‘‘ligatures’’ – the joins between pairs of letters – in Einstein’s handwriting and will ultimately create five versions for each pair. This means that when a typist types, the ligatures in each word change so that they are not overused, giving the writing a more realistic look.
Geisler said the technique was based on the rotating barrels of an Enigma encryption machine.
About 400 ‘‘glyphs’’ – digitised versions of the letters, ligatures, mathematical symbols and other characters that made up Einstein’s script – have been uploaded into software that will be used to hone the font.
There are hundreds more to go, however. The Freud font, which Geisler also designed, comprised 1467 glyphs.
However, the inspiration for the Freud font was more mischievous. ‘‘It made me smile to imagine a person writing his or her shrink a letter set in Freud’s handwriting,’’ Geisler wrote on his website.