Guillermo, Juan Carlos, Loraine or Gema lived in the streets of Barcelona when one day the Arrels Foundation He presented them with a project that would change their lives with something they had never given importance to: the typography of the posters with which they asked for help.
“A help please”, “I don't have a job and I have three children”, “I have lost everything”. Behind those messages written on cardboard, no one should forget that there is a human being . And a story to tell that can be the result of bad decisions, but also of plain and simple bad luck.
For example, that of Stere, who left his native Romania to come to Barcelona with a supposedly promised job and some papers that never arrived; wave of Loraine , a British woman who came on vacation and could not return, because the passport that she had given up for lost had been used illegally . Due to different situations, in the end neither of them could return home, making Barcelona a new home and two more numbers of the 4,000 homeless that is calculated has the city of Barcelona.
Buy fonts to help others, that's HomelessFonts.
With 1,350, the Arrels Foundation works every day, whose mission is that no one sleeps on the street. It was this foundation that saw the potential of something invisible to many, the letters of the cardboard signs , in order to create the solidarity initiative homelessfonts.org , the first web page that allows buy typefaces made by homeless people and whose benefits are intended for the collective.
"Humanize your brand" is the slogan with which Homelessfonts.org is presented, born with the intention that companies can acquire these unique and charitable typefaces for your advertising, corporate identity or packaging with funds that will go intended to help the more than 1,400 homeless people served by the Foundation. already done Valonga farm , on whose oil products Loraine's handwriting is printed, which she happily points out, that she "had never thought my handwriting could have any value."
She has it. Her handwriting and those of the other nine participants who, to create the fonts that appear on the page, carried out several workshops with typographic exercises that would allow their entire handwriting to be captured and then digitized and converted into usable fonts. The result is a digital manuscript of unique and personal typefaces "that reflect the character of each of the authors".
In fact, when you go to Homelessfonts.org you find a dozen fonts accompanied by a portrait . Those letters, more or less sinuous, large, small or even "little boy", were the same with which the ten participants in the initiative wrote their messages on the cardboard , those that had been expressly used to try to draw the attention of a passer-by who rarely stops to read.
These messages are much more than just banners.
Now your writing has acquired a value, Not only monetary, also humanitarian. Because together with the photograph of the author of the calligraphy in question, a brief history of the situation that took him to the street waits to be read.
born in collaboration with the advertising agency The Cyranos McCann , this compendium of letters full of personality is "a tool for raising awareness", because as the director of the foundation, Ferran Busquets, points out, "Homelessfonts.org was born as an innovative action that unites the artistic side with social commitment . It is a creative way of putting on the table and transforming the vision of the problem of homeless people”.
Real stories that could happen to any of us and that, with this initiative, he intends to show how easy it is to lose everything and how important it is to think of others. In fact, getting hold of one of these letters it is not just one more grain of sand to add in support of the foundation's social work, in addition, "all brands and designers who are committed to the use of Homelessfonts.org fonts will have a seal of quality to identify the project and thus demonstrate its social commitment ”, affirms Marta Grasa, director of accounts of the agency The Cyranos McCann.