“Trajan Trajan Trajan…”–it’s the Marsha Brady of fonts, at least when it comes to movie titles & posters. Kirby Ferguson rips hack designers a new one in this very funny video. Mark Hamburg quips, “If we want ‘cinematic’ UIs, then we obviously need to revise our typography…”
In other typography news:
- A new tutorial promises to teach everything about text in Photoshop. [Via] I haven’t probed & can’t vouch for its quality. For more tips, see my 12 Tips for Photoshop Text, which Russell Brown demos & expands upon in this video.
- Jenny Beorkrem makes very cool typographical posters of cities. [Via]
- Rob Rohan talks about Nciku, a tool that enables you to look up Chinese characters by drawing them. [Via]
- Eric Gill: great typographer, reeeal sketchy dude. I think I’m going to be raising an eyebrow at BBC posters for a while. [Via]
- Jon Tan has put together the Web Fonts Test Suite, useful for seeing the core Web fonts set with varying sizes/styles. (Baskerville sure has a pretty italic ampersand.)
- Depending on your political leaning, you might enjoy this little bit of typesetting. (Well, you might just enjoy the clever design treatment in any case.)
Hey John, They got so sick of Trajan at the university of Kansas that they have a website trajansucks.com . Kansas used to have a very recognizable letterform for all their athletic teams and last year they went thru and changed everything over to Trajan for a very bland, uniformed look.
[Hah–that’s awesome! Thanks for the lead. –J.]
The Web Fonts Test Suite looks nice, reminded me a couple of other useful resources on web type.
– Typetester — the Ultimate online tool, interactive widget (JS) for instant testing of web type.
– The companion site to the book “CSS, DHTML, & Ajax visual quickstart guide” offers a handy PDF of browser safe fonts as a free download.
Trajan bashing seems to be a popular hobby.
There’s also a Trajan movie called ‘Etched in stone’ on Veer.com
Trojan bashing should be a popular hobby!