• Hah: Katrin Eismann points out the 100 Best Signs At The Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear.
• From the school that is old:
  • Mark Simonson critiques anachronistic type use in films. [Via]
  • Neat tech artifacts: Pre-digital displays used tiny neon tubes for numbers.
• Shapes from type:
  • Check out these great city maps made of nothing but letters. [Via]
  • TechCrunch made sketches of Steve Jobs, assembled from his recent comments on Android.
• How about using Comic Sans as home security (ghetto design camouflage)?

Great news for anyone who cares about great-looking Web content: Adobe and Typekit are now offering a selection of Adobe typefaces for use in Web browsers.  Christopher Slye from the type team explains:

Every popular Web browser now supports font delivery over the web (via the CSS @font-face rule), giving designers more typographic options than ever before. We here at Adobe have been looking for the best way to get some of our most popular designs to you, so today we’re excited to announce a partnership with Typekit, the Web font pioneers of San Francisco who, since last year, have been leading the way in web font technology and delivery.

He goes on to share some details on the typefaces now offered:

Everyone knows Myriad and Minion — pervasive workhorse sans serif and serif typefaces, respectively, which will prove to be as useful on the Web as they have been in print. Thomas Phinney’s Hypatia Sans and Carol Twombly’s Chaparral are distinctive and versatile. Adobe Text is Robert Slimbach’s newest design which a lot of people haven’t even seen yet (so far it has only been available as a registration benefit for CS5 customers) but I’m certain it will quickly establish itself as a flexible and reliable text typeface, and I’m pleased it will now get a wider audience.

Richard Lipton’s classic Bickham Script is one of our most popular display typefaces and a distinctive addition to the Adobe Web Fonts collection. More of Robert Slimbach’s work now available for Web use include Adobe Garamond, Caflisch Script, Cronos, and the “display” designs for Garamond Premier (based on Claude Garamond’s beautiful Gros Canon type).

For complete details on browser support, licensing, etc., check out the project FAQ.

• De la vieja escuela:
  • Woodtyper.com offers gleefully archaic “Notes on Large and Ornamented Type and Related Matters.” [Via]
  • “No Flying Machines Over Seattle!” Discount menswear ad, 1917
  • Victorian-era Phaeton is excellent, and excellently named. [Via]
• Enjoy the gorgeous lettering of Irina Vinnik. [Via]
• Bizarre & excellent: “Wash your Han S.”
• Dave Cross shows off how to create a typographic portrait using Photoshop.
• PSDTuts features “53 Mind-blowing Uses of Typography.” I wouldn’t lay the praise on quite that thick, but some nice pieces are scattered throughout.

Heh–my friend Matthew’s 3-year-old son Cooper is learning Illustrator (!), and here he reveals his taste in fonts:

[Update: Some WordPress voodoo is afoot, auto-destroying my object/embed code. Here’s a link to the video.]

I’m with the little guy: we typeset our wedding programs in the big Z.

The work of Reid Miles comes to life as classic album covers get set in motion:

[Via]
Update: Here’s more info about the project.

Being a fan of stop-motion filmmaking, I thought I’d share a couple of great recent finds. (Full-screen viewing recommended in both cases.)

“Handcrafted with love by BYU design students and faculty, for the 5th Typophile Film Festival. A visual typographic feast… Everything in the film is real–no CG effects!” [Via Marc Pawliger]
Meanwhile, as for “8-Bit Trip,” good lord:

“1500 hours of moving Lego bricks and taking photos of them.” And I thought Gondry’s Fell In Love With A Girl vid was extreme. [Via]

• “63 expletives, 1 sentient muffin.” Yeah, that’s a pretty typical morning for me. We Are The Friction.
• “Kern All Letters Before Fuel Runs Out.” (All Your Glyphs Are Belong To Us.) Peep Veer’s Kern In Space.
• I’ve been enjoying the typography in the new Absolut ads ; Here’s the whole set of videos, spelling out their message.
• xkcd has fun bustin’ on Papyrus. [Via Tapani Otala]

• Inspired by WPA posters, Jeff Knowles and Neville Brody created the typeface New Deal for the new film Public Enemies.
• BibliOdyssey pulls some highlights from the Pratt Institute Libraries’ collection of more than 1200 Ex Libris (bookplate) images. (The F. Ranis piece is among my faves.)
• Check out the excellent (and excellently-named) Phaeton, from Kevin Cornell & type designer Randy Jones. See also Randy’s similarly cool Olduvai. [Via]

• In motion:
  • Chris Gavin’s stop-motion TXT ISLAND rocks*.
  • “This summer…,” it’s Big. Red. Text! [Via]
• Bleh:
  • Why can I not resist mentioning this jock strap font?
  • Bibliodyssey features a “Grotesque Alphabet” from the 16th century.
• Logos:
  • myInkBlog rounds up some cool Logo Inspiration With Clever Typography. [Via Bruce Bullis]
  • To that batch, I’d add this Mummy logotype.
• Music:
  • Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” rendered in the Modernist style. [Via Khoi Vinh]
  • Check out the Chopping Block’s billowing treatment for Phish.

* To quote a YouTube commenter: “When I saw all the cranes piling up the buildings, I though ‘OMFG, this guy is nuts! Look at how much time he spent!'” Agreed.

• “Clock Clock” turns 24 analog clocks into one big “digital” display.
• This Rubik’s Cube stamp promises to print the entire alphabet.
• Thomas Broome builds worlds out of subtle lettering. [Via]
• In a similar vein, H5’s video for Alex Gopher constructs a city of words (screenshots).

• Dylan Roscover has used typefaces from Apple ads to render a beautiful portrait of Steve Jobs. (Make sure to click the image to see a larger version.) [Via] Fair warning: seeing this portrait gave me weird dreams.
• To borrow from AJ Soprano, “What, no {freakin’} Papyrus??” Still, this take on photographers’ logos rings pretty true.
• Milk goes airborne to create letters in Jónas Valtýsson’s Sequences project.
• Yulia Brodskaya works in cutout paper, lending dimension to pretty swashes.

• Overviews & tutorials:
  • Photoshop forum user Phosphor has written up detailed tips for navigating through & editing text in PS.
  • On PSDTUTS, Alvaro Guzman has created A Comprehensive Introduction to the Type Tool.
  • Alex Beltechi shows How to Create a Richly Ornate Typographic Illustration in Photoshop.

• The New York Times has ditched Microsoft’s WPF technology and has introduced Times Reader 2.0 a 2.4MB Adobe AIR application. The app downloads & displays the entire day’s Times (including an interactive version of the crossword), so you can carry it wherever you go (e.g. planes, trains). Here’s a quick demo plus the download link. [Via]
• Adobe is getting a new corporate typeface that you’ll be seeing in future product updates. Clean (screenshot), designed by Robert Slimbach, is already used in the two-character application icons. (“PS,” etc.) [Via]
• Samsung’s new LED flat-screen TV has Flash support built in, enabling developers to deliver richly interactive content on these screens. I’m not sure about streaming HD video, but Adobe’s Digital Home announcement at NAB last month talked about embedding Flash for that purpose. (Flash Player PM Justin Everett-Church recently bought a Samsung TV and discovered that the TV’s documentation ships as SWFs on a USB memory stick.) [Via Mayank Kumar]

• Stihl takes a whack at the news with their various power tools.
• Motion
  • Type materializes, swirls, and explodes in this Audi “Filter” spot. The making-of piece makes one appreciate the enormous labor that goes into even a short piece.
  • Mercedes-Benz drives through a world of type. Love that lightning.
  • Nico Casavecchia’s La Mancha uses type to beckon viewers to “the Spain of Don Quixote.” (Man do I wish I could speak Spanish in that voice; I could really irritate the family.)
• Furniture
  • The laser-etched Type Tray is meant to keep your, ah, family ampersands frosty.
  • Dig this “Limited Edition” chair (for anything but sitting, of course).

I’ve recently had gotten a few type-related questions, so thought I’d jot down a few suggestions:

• Support for type styles (i.e. the ability to define a set of text characteristics as a style, then to modify the style & have text layers updated) was the top requested feature among those I proposed to improve management of complex PSDs. Photoshop doesn’t yet support type styles, but in the meantime a couple things may help:
  • You can select multiple text layers at once, then change their characteristics via the Character & Paragraph panels. Shift-clicking or Cmd/Ctrl-clicking works, or you can select a text layer, then choose Select->Similar Layers to select other text layers.
  • You can grab the type tool, set up the characteristics you want, then make a new tool preset (Window->Tool Presets, or hit that T-shaped icon in the upper left corner (y’know, the one that neither you nor any other human being has clicked :-)). You can then choose among these presets via the Tool Presets panel.
• Adobe Evangelist Julieanne Kost pointed out a trick I didn’t know: “To change the Type tool’s default options, the key is to close all documents. Then choose the Type tool and select your font family, style, size, anti-aliasing, alignment and color. Whatever options you choose, will become your new default.”
• Julieanne makes another good point: While typing text, hitting Return will add a line break instead of getting you out of text mode. Hit Cmd-Return (Mac)/Ctrl-Return (Win) to get out of text mode.

For more info, see my old 12 Tips for Photoshop Text post.

• Having grown up on skate graphics, I dig Ray Frenden’s hyperkinetic hand lettering.
• I want your skulls… Turn type into a 3D-looking death’s head in this tutorial.
• I love the excellent simplicity of these Really Short Films.
• Olay buries numerals in their new ads.
• Peep this Typographic World Map by Russian artist Vlad Gerasimov. [Via]
• typo/graphic posters delivers… well, you know. And lots of ’em.

• Need for Speed: The Art of the Title Sequence shows off some great examples of high-speed type & imagery from movie title sequences.
• The Periodic Table of Typefaces drops some serif science. [Via]
• Aoyama Hina makes ridiculously delicate, intricate papercut lettering. More photos are on Flickr.
• Smashing Magazine has rounded up 50 Stunning Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials (more than a little overwhelming, but sure to contain some gems).
• Sometimes one letter makes all the difference.

• Stewart Smith’s Histoface lets you embed secret text into an image’s histogram, making it show up in Photoshop’s Levels dialog. That’s rad. IronicSans has the details. [Via Nicolas Chaunu]
• “Whip out your iPhone and snap a photo, and WhatTheFont for iPhone will identify that font in seconds!” How freakin’ great is that?
• If that’s up your alley, check out i love typography’s round-up of iPhone typography apps.
• TypeDNA’s interesting FontShaker offers “a new way to visually explore the fonts you have installed locally using Flash. It also gives you a place to save comments, tags, rating and samples… We have also started to add the ability so that you can open a font file in Photoshop from the flash movie.”

• Density:
  • The groovy Wordle is “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.” So go rock it! [Via]
  • 389 Years Ago charts African American history.
  • Missed Connections turns Craigslist notices into attractive maps. [Via]
  • This year’s Grammy Awards feature a typographical portrait of Thom Yorke. [Via]
• Double Buttcheek Score: Scrabble-inspired pillows are among 15 typography-based objects. See also the
  Scrabble keyboard. [Via Bryan O’Neil Hughes]
• Jen Renninger brings the feel of old-school flash cards to her Modern Design deck.
• Authentic Ink is a drippin’ good old fraktur font.
• Hand-made fonts beg to be touched. [Update: Reader Hanford Lemoore reports getting malware notices with the link, so I’ve removed it from the main text.  I’m not seeing any problems (at least via Mac browsers), so here’s the active link if you still want to click it.]

• The NYT features the nicely typeset Buzzwords of 2008. (Let’s hear it for photobombing!)

• Design Won’t Save the World…: Wow, that’s some bracing feedback.
• Jamie Gregory has made a super fun Zoological Typeface, specifically for zoo signage. [Via]
• Just My Type constructs the entire alphabet using just linear & radial gradients.
• Fabio Sasso shows how to create “smoke type” in Photoshop in 10 steps. (See PSDTUTS for lots more PS/smoke-related inspiration.)
• Here’s a large set of the opening titles of B-movies. (Buckaroo Banzai was a B-movie? And Dune?) [Via]

• Flipping Typical is a beautifully simple, browser-based way to compare words set in the different typefaces installed on your computer. Awesome. The “WTF?” (About) page contains more info. [Via]
• Type from novel objects:
  • Garamond powerline
  • Obama dingbats
  • Molecular typography [Via Tapani Otala]
• Talk about “The tyranny of choice”: YouWorkForThem rounds up “300 of the best digital Blackletter typefaces.” If there are 300 “best” ones, how many must there be in total? And how many could a person need?? (My logotype above is a mash-up of two.)
• Paris-based nobrain has created a whole series of groovy 5-second identities for France’s TF1. [Via]
• Ecofont claims to use 20% less ink than other fonts. [Via]

Adobe’s Russell Brown has one-upped (ten-upped?) my suggestions for creating Star Wars crawl-style text in Photoshop.  He’s created a video demo that shows off the whole process and adds some new twists.

Previously: Russell did something similar with my 12 Tips for Photoshop Text, producing a demo that busts out the tip list to 16.

• In my office I’ve got a black metal-and-enamel “Bklyn Bridge” sign from the subway station where I used to switch trains when I was new to New York. (No, I didn’t steal the sign–though I didn’t ask the seller a ton of questions.) I miss the city, and I enjoyed reading The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway. [Via]
• “Mmm… sexy type.” Seb Lester has skills. Check out his lovely F-bomb. [Via]
• John Boardley of “I Love Typography” has started the My Favorite Letters Flickr Pool where you can share you favorite letters of your favorite typefaces. [Via]
• Filippo Minelli’s Contradictions project “writing the names of anything connected with the 2.0 life we are living in the slums of the third world is to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies.”
• Type-related quip o’ the month: “The runoff in the Georgia Senate race was won this week by Saxby Chambliss, who is the incumbent Republican senator and not, as I believed, an obscure font.” –Amy Poehler

• I don’t see an image credit, but Love Letters may get you pining for a Selectric.
• Arabic calligraphy: lovely. Painting with light: groovy. Check out the combo.
• Flickr user Maura has amassed a collection of great bottlecaps. [Via]
• The site also features a set of Star Wars ABCs. (Let’s hear it for Porkins!)
• Smashing Magazine hosts a huge round-up of vintage & retro-styled type.
• 3D
  • GoMediaZine has an interesting tutorial on using Illustrator + Photoshop to create non-cheesy 3D type.
  • Dig this extruded Print Magazine cover design. If it’s up your alley, see also the hugely detailed making-of article.