The Universal Typeface Experiment was a promotional website funded by

Société Bic Société Bic S.A., commonly called Bic and stylized as BiC, is a French manufacturing corporation based in Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine. It sells a world-leading brand of lighters and pens since its founding by Marcel Bich (1914–1994) in 1945, an ...

, the maker of the

Bic pen The BIC Cristal (stylised as BiC Cristal and also known as the Bic pen) is an inexpensive, disposable ballpoint pen mass-produced and sold by Société Bic of Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine, France. It was introduced in December 1950 and is the best-se ...

. The website crowdsourced a

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands ...

with mobile users who entered their handwriting on the website using a

touchpad A touchpad or trackpad is a pointing device featuring a tactile sensor, a specialized surface that can translate the motion and position of a user's fingers to a relative position on the operating system that is made output to the screen. Touch ...

and the then newly updated BIC pen called the ''Crystal Stylus'', which included a touchpad-friendly rubber tip. Though it was possible to participate using one's fingers, writing with a pen was significantly easier. Notwithstanding this difference, the website offered the contributor the opportunity to sign in and answer some demographic questions, enabling automatic aggregation of statistics about handwriting that sparked an article in the

Smithsonian magazine ''Smithsonian'' is the official journal published by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The first issue was published in 1970. History The history of ''Smithsonian'' began when Edward K. Thompson, the retired editor of ''Life'' ma ...

. The downloadable font created by this ''averaged handwriting experiment'' was heavily influenced by the user prompt, whereby the user was presented with 26 capital letters in random order in the

Arial Arial (also called Arial MT) is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts in the neo-grotesque style. Fonts from the Arial family are included with all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 3.1 on, some other Microsoft software appli ...

font. Within the confines of this

self-selection bias In statistics, self-selection bias arises in any situation in which individuals select themselves into a group, causing a biased sample with nonprobability sampling. It is commonly used to describe situations where the characteristics of the p ...

, regional differences were easily recognizable. The website, hosted by

Tribal DDB Tribal Worldwide (Formerly Tribal DDB) is a global network of interactive agencies, established in 2000, when the advertising company DDB integrated all its interactive-web properties under the ''Tribal'' brand. Tribal Worldwide is part of Omnico ...

and developed by the Dutch ad agency

MediaMonks Media.Monks is a digital-first marketing and advertising services company that connects content, data and digital media and technology services and produces websites, games, films, social media content, digital advertising campaigns, data and mea ...

, was originally intended as a product launch and was scheduled to be taken down in August 2014. It won the "Site of the Month" award by the Favourite Website Awards (FWA) and was still live and accepting contributions in January 2015.Universal Typeface
on FWA website for July 2014

References

{{reflist
The Universal Typeface Project Averages the World's Handwriting to Produce an Incredibly Average Font
in Smithsonian magazine, 9 July 2014 Casual script typefaces Defunct websites