Redaction

Redaction is a bespoke typeface commissioned by Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts’ The Redaction exhibition at MoMA PS1. As part of a timely conversation at the intersection of history, the legal system and social justice, the fonts will be free for personal use. In a spirit of generosity, the artists invite everyone to broaden the ethos of the exhibition by making these tools accessible to a global and engaged audience

It was always the hope to include bitmap grades of the font in order to reference the degradation of documents as they are reproduced through the legal process. As contemporary design moves through a zeitgeist of pixelation, with many incredible examples online, the team recalled the landmark designs by Susan Kare for the original Apple Operating System and many of Zuzana Licko’s early digital fonts for Emigre. The team maintained a conceptual framework for the degraded versions; it’s decidedly not merely an aesthetic. By providing a range of grades from subtly analog to nearly illegible, the typeface nods to the transformation and marginalization that many people face in the criminal justice system today, and specifically, the role and responsibility of the author of text to be conscious of legibility as a signature of power.

As part of the artists’ dedication to social justice and legal equity, the Redaction fonts are distributed under the Open Font License. You can use them freely in your products and projects – print or digital, commercial or otherwise. However, you can't sell the fonts on their own. The fonts are available in 3 styles (Regular, Italic, Bold) and 7 grades of degradation for a total of 21 fonts. All fonts have full character sets for Latin-1 language support.

Source: https://www.redaction.us/