Sam Potts sets cool type (“All projects 100% Times Roman-free,” he promises). Check out his designs for pal John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise; the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.; and more. Sam was kind enough to let me pick his brain at his studio in NY last week. While we were talking, a shipment of Gmund paper (made in Germany from recycled beer bottle labels) arrived. “I’ll sleep with this paper,” he said, “if it’ll have me…” [Via Maria Brenny]
Take care when you rotate type, or you might end up with something like the WTF Mac Store. [Via]. Elsewhere in the Dept. of Signs Begging to be Misread, my wife remembers two signs in stairwell in Seattle right next to one another: one for “Gary’s Den” (the words stacked) and the other for “Rage” (some sort of boutique). With no distinction in background color it read as “Gary’s Rage Den”.
“EverysingletimeI stood in line at the Neptune,” she says, “I replayed the same line of questioning in my head about angry, angry Gary and his need for a Rage Den.”
A bit of historical fun: the NYT features an image of the Women’s Typographical Union aboard a float in 1908.
FontShop’s magazine devoted to all things typographic has a new issue, Font 006, cruising through the snail mail system. Previous issues are online on the site. [Via]
Steve Patterson has produced a nice, approachable tutorial on creating faux 3D text in Photoshop. The cheese factor is refreshingly low.