Good Glyphs

 
Project by Calvin Waterman/Violet Office

A dingbat font created by 32 designers. All proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders. GOOD GLYPHS is licensed under SIL Open Font License.

Premise text from Violet Office:
We (Violet Office) are asking for your help to make something that does a little good! As lockdowns have tightened their grip and the global impact is coming into focus, our need to give back has become paramount. We see a unique opportunity to bring a group of amazing designers together to create a fundraising tool that plays into our collective strengths and transcends our physical limitations. Our proposal is GOOD GLYPHS.

GOOD GLYPHS will be a dingbat typeface created from artwork by 36 designers. Historically dingbats have been a way to package and share graphic symbols. We’re hoping to adapt the format to collaboratively create the dingbat font of 2020. We view this as a collection of artwork akin to a digital gallery.

Obviously, we want to create a fucking rad dingbat typeface that activates artworks and pushes positive vibes into the world, but the bigger goal is to use our collective creativity to raise money for people that need our support!

My Description (c. 2020)
I became interested in the idea of voids and black holes in January 2017. Black holes are a place of ultimate darkness—they suck energy. It felt like the right symbol for the news cycle at the time, and my emotional response to the state of the nation. Lately, I have been thinking of the void more as the “unknown” and how life keeps asking me to be comfortable with not knowing. The most optimistic person I know is my Grandmother. She's 95 years old and also named Mary Banas and right now is in the hospital with the coronavirus. When I was growing up, she would often “see faces” in inanimate objects — like a cloud or a tree. My siblings and I would look for the face, sometimes we could see it, other times not. She also had an affinity for the iconic “smiley face” and would stick them on the back of envelopes when she sent me mail. As a young designer, I thought smiley faces were too soft, not intellectual enough. At some point, I realized the smiley is the most important graphic shorthand we have.