“For those who regret what keyboards and touch screens have done to their penmanship, typographer Harald Geisler has an answer: Sigmund Freud.” Sarah Sloat
Sometimes a font is just a font, except when it is based on the handwriting of Sigmund Freud, the neurologist who lived from 1856 to 1939. His research and studies led to the foundation of psychoanalysis. German typographer, Harald Geisler, turned his fascination with the famed psychoanalyst's century-old letters into “typoanalysis” and subsequently created an elegant typeface.
“It made me smile to imagine a person writing his or her shrink a letter set in Freud's handwriting,” said Geisler, who studied original documents in the archives of Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna and Freud Museum London to develop four alphabets that are interchanged at random — "slippage,” if you will. While typing, you never know what version of each letter will appear, creating words that look like authentic handwriting.
In 2013, using Kickstarter, Geisler set a funding goal of $1,500, which would pay for travel and accommodations in Vienna. The campaign, when it closed, raised more than $25,000, allowing the Frankfurt typographer to spend a longer period in Vienna studying the looping tails of Freud's “p”s and “q”s.
Since then, Geisler has created typefaces based on the handwriting of Albert Einstein (2015), Martin Luther (2017) and Martin Luther King Jr. (2019).
To read more about the typeface that started it all and to watch a short video about its creation, click on the link below.