Deborah Khodanovich's font honours the most trivialised form of communication - gossip

""I've been obsessed with gossip since forever. I'm a very relationship oriented person, with my love and care for my friends & community (and vice versa) being quite a big value driver," says Deborah. "Gossip to me is far from a bad thing, but rather a tool that communities use to understand and uphold their own values, shared beliefs and to be able to take care of one another through knowing what's going on in each other's lives.""

"Determined to make a meaningful commentary on gossip through typography, Deborah researched how gossip has been demonised by "the church and the patriarchy to keep women silent" in the 16th and 17th centuries. Gossip can be seen as threatening, but also useful because it's informal. Not only can it evade censorship, it also exists outside of the concrete nature of the written word - instead, gossip is fleeting, personal and untraceable."

"In Deborah's book Gossip: An Investigation Into The Feminine Art Of Conversation, the relationship between textiles and gossip is central. Whilst taking a textiles class, Deborah learned about historical safe spaces where women were allowed to gather together without men - these were usually crafting spaces - and Deborah hypothesised that, due to arduous long shifts of knitting, weaving and embroidery, this is where gossip prevailed."

Gossip operates as a communal tool for understanding and upholding shared values and for enabling mutual care among communities. Gossip is informal, fleeting, personal and untraceable, which allows it to evade censorship and resist rigid, written authority. Gossip faced historical demonisation by the church and patriarchy in the 16th and 17th centuries as a means to silence women. Gossip is framed as a craft—a skill to master—rather than an art. Textile craft spaces historically functioned as safe, gendered gathering sites where long shifts of knitting, weaving and embroidery created conditions for conversation. Typographic work reclaims blackletter Textura associations of permanence and control by embedding a gossip-related typeface within that tradition.

Read at Itsnicethat