Sometimes is not design considerations that are the most important criteria in selecting a font – what if it’s privacy? Over the last few years we’ve heard all sorts of allegations and evidence from people like Edward Snowden regarding the amount of surveillance that actually goes on. THat’s not targeted surveillance either, the broad scooping up of people’s data operated by the NSA in the US and GCHQ in the UK.

Sure you can go to some measure to ensure that you keep your stuff private. There’s a boom in encryption and VPN technologies that can keep your browsing and online communication secure, here’s a great place to start out reading – http://www.theninjaproxy.org/. However there are other additional methods you can take too – how about a font that helps protect what your saying from automated tools designed to spy on us. Most of the authorities use data mining and OCR tools to quickly scan through written data looking for ‘incriminating’ text.

Take a look at this font designed to fool AI systems -it’s called ZXX and was designed by Sang Mung, here’s his site.

The idea is that the font ZXX which is named after the code that congress uses to define ‘no linguistic content’, fools all these automated scanning systems into thinking there’s no real readable text there.  However human beings can interpret the content just fine.

Obviously this is not a substitute for encryption, however it represents perhaps a more powerful political statement against the growing encroachment of the big brother state.