Lithuania is a country of difficult history - same applies to its birth certificate - Independence Act, signed in 1918, lost in the turmoil of wars and rediscovered in Berlin in 2017. Unfortunately, even though Germany lent the Act for the centennial celebration, it will eventually retrieve it.

The significance of the Act for the people of Lithuania is indescribable: each line, word, letter and curvature encodes our freedom. That is the reason why we created Signato - typeface of freedom, recreated from the manuscript of the Act of Independence, so people could use it, share it and create a future story.

Also, additional touch-points were created: Lithuanians around the world were invited to sign the online version of the Act thus becoming co-signatories of it, also, have their signatures written by specially programmed "robot hand" - plotter, making Signato one of the most engaging design projects in the region.

Font took four months to create, redrawing every letter with precision, while also having to study additional written works by Jurgis Šaulys, man who 100 years ago wrote the text of the Independence Restoration Act, to reproduce the missing letters.

The main challenge was conveying the overall appearance of the handwriting, as the referenced document writing is quite disruptive, and some letters are written and merged in several ways. Creating several variations for both letters and numbers, a total of 480 symbols were created, so that the computer can simulate it as if a typeface was written by a person - it is programmed that the same letters look different every time you type them in. Signato uses Latin, German and Lithuanian alphabet.