Gossip is a blackletter pixel font connecting the web and textiles, inspired by Gutenberg’s first lead type font—Textura, and Susan Kare’s Cairo glyphs.
Gossip and blackletter typography, at first glance, couldn’t feel more opposite. Gossip moves through whispers and fleeting moments, while blackletter roots itself in permanence, weight, and authority. Yet, both share a fraught history. Gossip, often weaponized against women, has been trivialized as idle chatter, despite its role in building and sustaining social networks. Blackletter, too, carries the weight of being both revered and feared, a font that once represented the pinnacle of printed knowledge.
When Gutenberg set his first lead type in Textura, blackletter became the visual language of mass communication, used to shape narratives and define truths. The words text and textile etymologically come from the same place—Textura, which can be defined as a weaving, a web, a texture, a structure. Gossip takes Gutenberg’s Textura, digitizes, and pixels it back into the new platform for information dissemination, the web, while also being designed to be easily translated back into textiles.
