Greta Thunberg’s Handwriting Sprouts as a New Typeface

Greta Thunberg at 2019 EU political leader plenary session in Strasbourg, France. (image courtesy European Parliament/Flickr CC)

If you find yourself with a burning need to tell it like it is, a startup called Uno has produced the font of your dreams, based on the handwriting of young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. Thunberg has been asking tough questions about climate change since the age of 8, but she popped up on the radar of climate change politics after beginning a school strike outside Swedish Parliament in August 2018, when she was 15. This year, the remarkable teenager traveled via sailboat across the Atlantic, making a zero carbon-emission journey to attend a United Nations summit on climate change, where she rained fire down on the assembled diplomats and politicians for their short-sightedness and lack of maturity in failing to address the ongoing crisis of human impact on the planet in favor of unsustainable economic growth models.

Quote: Greta Thunberg; typeface: Greta Grotesk Regular by Uno (layout by Hyperallergic)

“I have Aspergers syndrome so, for me, most things are black or white,” Thunberg wrote in a 2018 opinion piece for the Guardian. “I look at the people in power and wonder how they have made things so complicated. I hear people saying that climate change is an existential threat, yet I watch as people carry on like nothing is happening.”

Great Grotesk Regular by Uno. Image courtesy of Uno.

The font, titled “Greta Grotesk Regular” is available for free download, attributed to Thunberg, and based on the sign she made and utilized while striking outside Parliament, that said “SKOLSTREJK FÖR KLIMATET” (SCHOOL STRIKE FOR CLIMATE). Uno, for its part, is a startup producing “one incredible cup” to counteract the prevalence of single-use cups and bottles.

Uno’s product is available for reservations, but you can download the font now. It’s the perfect choice for graphic artists, activists, and anyone else preparing scorched earth manifestos, letters of resignation, or poison pen missives against oil companies. For all your real talk, big and small, Greta Grotesk is there to set it out in black and white.