Cereal’s Jeff Knight and collaborator Brittany Sickler took on a city project to bring functional art to downtown Fargo, ND—but rather than simply lay down a few installations, the pair teamed up with the ASL awareness group Deaf Friendly Fargo and a local welding artist to marry art and function, with an added layer of purpose.
Their concept: a bicycle rack that spells out the city’s name in sign language in a high-traffic zone. And not long after it was installed, other cities came knocking.
“These requests brought about a means of simplifying the process by creating a font that could be downloaded, manipulated and given to a welding specialist to create other letters and words for cities around the world,” Knight writes. “The font was created in a way that takes into careful consideration how a 2D graphic representation of an ASL signed letter would be made into a bike rack (closing up gaps, providing stability in certain cases, and other aesthetic decisions).”
Ultimately, Knight says his hope is to spread awareness of ASL communities and organizations—and to that end, the font is free to download via Cereal’s website here.
