so, today i learned that BIC ran an advertisement campaign 10 years ago, one that actually yielded something interesting, a font that was an average sum of people's handwriting! it was called the "universal typeface experiment"

...but the campaign got taken down the year after, and it was extremely hard tracking down the fonts for the longest time.

so, someone on reddit randomly popped up with a sketchy download link to it, so i snagged it and plopped it on internet archive so that this shit doesn't get lost lmfao

https://archive.org/details/universal-typeface-experiment
Universal Typeface Experiment fonts : Société Bic, MediaMonks : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

This is a collection of fonts from the BIC promotional campaign called Universal Typeface Experiment, you can read about it from the wikipedia article:...

Internet Archive
@EeveeEuphoria That's fascinating indeed - especially the universal handwriting of that one guy from the Netherlands Antilles... The "Believe in the Law of Small Numbers" is strong in them...
#scientism
@EeveeEuphoria so cool! I've added a link to it to the Wikipedia article, let's see if it stays.
@EeveeEuphoria #Alt4You #Alt4U A screenshot of a row of folder icons named industry, handedness, gender, country, and age, each containing handwriting fonts of their category. To the right of the folder icons, a separate font file called "unitype-current.ttf."
@EeveeEuphoria this is super cool!! thank you for archiving it :D
@EeveeEuphoria I keep seeing this on my timeline and reading it as someone screaming in response to survey questions. 
@EeveeEuphoria Those folder icons are perfect :D
@EeveeEuphoria huh, it doesn't have numbers, just letters 
@EeveeEuphoria Awesome! What does a sentence in this typeface look like?
@EeveeEuphoria awesome, I'd probably never even found out about this otherwise. Thanks!
@EeveeEuphoria Very interesting, can't atm think of a use for me for an all caps font, but keeping it in the library. My favourite for coding is Jellyka CuttyCupcakes, it makes the process seem more human. From one person's handwriting I believe
@EeveeEuphoria fascinating! I wish they could have fleshed this out more with numbers, punctuation marks, and lowercase. It's still really cool though!

@EeveeEuphoria Pity it only does uppercase letters… some digits and punctuation at least could have been thrown in. FontForge whines about the font name.

I wonder how hard it'd be to replicate the same thing today.

@EeveeEuphoria are you able to add alt text (so that i can boost it)?