By Lorrin Windahl.

According to Homelessness Australia, the second highest cause of homelessness is financial difficulties. So, it is great to hear of an organisation working with the homeless to help them generate an income. And even better for this blog, that it involves design. The project is Homelessfonts. Put simply, fonts created from the handwriting of homeless people.

The Arrels Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation working in Barcelona, hope to make homelessness a thing of the past. One initiative for gaining exposure for their cause, and to provide a little more dignity to those that find themselves homeless, is Homelessfonts.

Basically, a volunteer designer traces the person’s handwriting in order to create a digital representation. This is then tweaked and uploaded to the Homelessfont website for sale. Each sale of a font generates an income for that homeless person.

Sounds like a pretty cool idea to me.  If you are interested in purchasing one of these fonts or would like to offer your design skills to create new fonts, head to the Homelessfonts website.

All images courtesy of Homelessfonts.