Nordic newspaper Helsingin Sanomat develops a free font that visualises climate change in real-time
By Joe Colquhoun on Thursday, January 14, 2021
Newspaper Helsingin Sanomat & TBWA\Helsinki have developed the world’s first ‘Climate Crisis Font’ that reveals the shocking rate at which the Arctic sea ice is melting.
The weight of the font varies depending on the data sourced from the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s (NSIDC). From 1979 to 2019 and as the year’s progress, readers will notice the shocking rate at which the font seems to disappear and melt away. Helsingin Sanomat plans to continue with IPCC’s projection until 2050.
By listing the font as free to download on their website, anyone that uses it will be demonstrating the effects of global warming at that given time.
“Our mission is to make complex matters comprehensible and since seeing is believing we wanted to bolster the conversations on climate change with something concrete and instantly understandable. These kinds of new methods of journalistic storytelling also complement our recent investments in data journalism. Yet, we don’t just want to keep it to ourselves, which is why we are giving it out for free and hope to see it in use elsewhere as well”, says Tuomas Jääskeläinen, the art director of Helsingin Sanomat.
The font is freely available for download here. Helsingin Sanomat intends on using the font in future articles covering climate crisis, encouraging anyone covering the same topic to download the font and make use of it too.