Shake.ttf: A Typeface with Parkinson's | Hacker News Reader

Shake.ttf: A Typeface with Parkinson's

writewithparkinsons.com

47 pointscampuscodi8 comments

The author talks about using this font to preserve their mother’s handwriting as her Parkinson’s progresses. That’s a really sweet and thoughtful use of technology to help someone cope with a really awful illness.

But outside of that usage, I can’t think of a tasteful way to use this font. I’m sure some folks may buy the font to help support the cause though, and that’s cool.

That's ok. Not everything needs to be tasteful.

It is a very useful tool to raise awareness for Parkinson's disease. If you don't have an use simply don't use.

If you were concerned about losing your handwriting (if you were say - recently diagnosed with Parkinson's), you might want to have a font made that uses your own handwriting so that you could continue to write with your own style. I think this was one of the primary uses that was envisioned... not necessarily preserving a loved one's handwriting as an archive, but for the affected individual to use day to day.

It's not just about the publicly available font (which is a great tool for awareness), but also the service to capture someone's handwriting as a font.

My Dad has Parkinson's and this is exactly how I intend on using it. Helping him get his papers in order, his recipes together while still making it look and feel _from him_.

The one concept of Parkinsonian writing/Parkinsonian movement is that the tremor is only one part (and is often variable - as it is a rest tremor that actually disappears with intention or movement). There are some folks that do have shaky letters but others will not.

The other interesting part of it is that the spatial representation of the letters/hand/arm movements, and indeed of limb movements in space, is that it shrinks over time. The term is micrographia. I think the whole idea of how 3D space is represented in the brain is still far from clear, but whoever is able to come up with a good reproducible model would be really onto something

(*I would also bet that maybe it's different/distinct from the hippocampal "place" or "grid" cells that won the Mosers the Nobel)..

The zero character reminds me of the OpenDyslexic font (which is my primary font) - https://www.dafont.com/open-dyslexic.font

There's a couple of sites out there that do a similar "fill out our template and get a .ttf of your handwriting" thing, like Calligraphr[0] and Fontifier[1].

The concept of using a typeface for Parkinson's awareness and fundraising isn't too bad, though. It'll be interesting to see the next version of the font.

[0] https://www.calligraphr.com/en/

[1] http://www.fontifier.com/

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