Harriet Richardson invites us into thirty years of private diary pages with F37 Harriet 4, 13, and 30 — a collection that traces life through three defining eras of her handwriting.
Starting with F37 Harriet 4 from 1999, Harriet’s handwriting is naïve. At just four years old, even the most critical type designers among us won’t hold the inconsistent heights, large size, and irregular shapes against her. The playful rawness and unpolished warmth of the style could only have come from someone unabashed of style. In F37 Harriet 13 from 2009, at age thirteen, her handwriting is distinctly more self-aware. The pressure and strain are visible — signs of an applied, slightly forced style. That universal moment of trying so hard to look like you’re not trying. The most chalant-nonchalant of all the ages. Now, in 2025, there is a casual confidence present throughout the letter shapes, with her distinct ductus immortalised in F37 Harriet 30. All three styles are packed with complex OpenType features to give each an authentic handwritten feel, as well as a collection of drawings to provide appropriate doodling details. F37 Harriet 30 is the most technically complex of the three, offering dozens of ligatures and alternates that allow specific words like “Loser” and “Hottie” to be graphically highlighted. Even Harriet’s exes aren't safe— each one immortalised with a custom ligature. F37 Harriet 30 also includes authentic underline and strike-through features.
Harriet Richardson
• F37 Harriet
• Styles 3
• 2025
The Designer
Harriet Richardson is a London-based performance artist and writer whose work unsettles the boundary between digital and physical experience.
Using her body, her experiences, and intimate documentation as material, she invites audiences into complicity— exploring love, sex, power dynamics, and the complexity of human connection— more often than not through a humorous lense. Harriet believes we begin performing the moment we become self-aware, and her work draws directly from everyday life, turning private moments into collective, participatory art. Her performances fuse offline artwork with humour, satire, and conceptual protest, opening up questions about class, conflict, climate crisis, and the quiet violence of social structures.
Inspiration
F37 Harriet
Interview
Tell us about the inspiration behind your collaboration with F37®×. If it was an unused concept, what was the potential use case for it.
So much of my work comes from some deep-rooted, restless need to document. I think, more than anything, through fear or anxiety of forgetting. As an avid diary-keeper, I've come to see our handwriting like our sense of smell: suddenly you catch a random wiff of a past-time and you’re transported, whether you wanted to go back there or not. That’s really the heart of this collaboration with F37— taking something so personal and fallible (my own handwriting at different ages) and turning it into something people can feel, and use, or even misuse. My idea was to make a typeface that felt diaristic and confessional— and at it's very core, a completely selfish act of wanting to immortalise, and play with, past versions of myself. 'As concerning as it is endearing', as my therapist put it. And as a former designer, I know the value of a convincing handwritten font— but I also saw a gap: instead of different weights, why not different ages? To me, that simple shift pushes it from just a font to a piece of art in its own right.
When starting the process of creating your font, what typographic conventions did you look to break or experiment with? Or were there conventions of functionality you championed?
Honestly, it was really just a case of pouring through three decades of diaries and being as time-accurate as possible. The whole point was to keep it unconventional— not polished, not too clean, but true to how my handwriting actually looked at ages 4, 14, and 30. The fun was in compiling and having a go at being different versions of myself again— which turned out to be worryingly easy to slip back into. Once a yearner always a yearner, I guess. So instead of breaking typographic rules in a technical sense, I wanted to break the illusion that a handwritten font should look neat, timeless, or ‘perfectly imperfect.’ Mine really isn’t.
Now that your typeface has launched, what would be your dream project to use your F37® typeface on?
I wish to receive handwritten letters from myself in the post that I never wrote, making me question reality even more than I currently do. I adopt myself as a pen pal, responding to the different ages with confessions, giving advice, asking questions. After a lot of back and forth over many months, it turns out 4-year-old me is more emotionally literate and psychologically capable than the lot of us. All three are unsurprised.
What have you learnt through developing and creating your own typeface(s) with our F37® type designers?
That, just like accents, you think you don’t have a style until it’s compared to others. My handwriting looked so standard and everyday to me, but when dissected by typographic experts, I was presented with a set of quirks and personality I’d completely overlooked— all of which now live on in the letterforms. What a treat.
How would you describe your typeface in three words?
It accidentally has all the ingredients for a dream date: Intimate. Flexible. Overly confessional.
F37 Harriet Font Sampler
