With over 100 Billion items produced by Bic, the Cristal ballpoint pen is the best selling pen ever. It can be called the world’s pen – the universal pen.

Yet this pen is so universal, such a commodity that it hardly gets the attention it deserves. We were tasked to change that, especially in the design-savvy community on the web, where the concept of writing by hand seems kind of counter-intuitive at first glance.

The idea: If there’s a universal pen, there should be a universal handwriting, too. Time for an experiment.

On www.theuniversaltypeface.com we firstly address design and especially typography-savvy users, who enter their own handwriting, which then becomes part of the universal typeface – an ever-changing, evolving font that can be downloaded at various stages of development, which then trickles down to a broader user base.

In essence it’s the first crowd sourced cross-section of human handwriting.

On www.theuniversaltypeface.com users enter their own handwriting, which then becomes part of the universal typeface – an ever-changing, evolving font that can be downloaded and used on desktop computers at various stages of development.

In essence it’s the first crowd sourced cross-section of human handwriting that came into existence thanks to touchscreens.

As many people from as many countries as possible should participate, so we made participating as easy and intuitive as possible: there is a mobile version of the website and a mobile-enabled desktop version, which lets users enter their handwriting right via their touchscreen.

As the experiment has just started no final results are available yet. However the number of characters entered as well as countries involved can be viewed on the site.