Finland’s Helsingin Sanomat newspaper has created a free and downloadable variable font that aims to make the urgency of climate change tangible by mirroring the declining amount of Arctic sea ice in its disappearing letterforms. While a regular typeface has certain pre-determined styles like bold or italic, the Climate Crisis Font allows users to adjust its font weight with the help of a sliding timescale.This allows them to select any year between 1979 when satellite measurements of Arctic ice first began and 2050, by which time it is expected to have shrunk by 30 per cent.

In 1979, the font, much like the ice, is at its thickest, with extra bold characters and what Helsingin Sanomat‘s art director Tuomas Jääskeläinen describes as “icy sharp edges”. But as the years go by, the silhouette of the letters becomes ever more curved and thin as if they were melting away or sinki ng into the ocean.The exact weight of the font at any point is based on historical data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), as well as future projections released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).