This project came from a question my friend Easton West asked me: “can a typeface represent a community? a group of people?” I took this question and ran with it, it led me to the idea of a collective voice … or perhaps collective view of the alphabet. Over the course of the research I collected 100 writing samples (alphabets & numerals) using a strict collection methodology. I collected samples from people within my community, people from school and people I met at events or on the street. ¶ Not knowing what to expect, I then began to overlay the characters on top of each other in order to try and extract an average image of the alphabet. To my surprise the result was more akin to a sans-serif typeface than I had previously imagined. Here are some samples of my process thus far, in the near future I plan to extract a skeleton from these ‘average’ letters and hopefully make an attempt at using these skeletons as a basis for a typeface design.

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