Font art geekery
 

I love fonts. I love the subtlety of font variation and how it affects the mood of what you're expressing. My work in photoshop has cultivated this, as I studied the fonts of dozens of Disneyland signs, tried to find similar ones online, and noticed the minute differences. In some cases I had to chop up letters and make new ones with the pieces.

I just saw this and I'm wondering if anyone else here is as captivated as I am by it. I mean, look at the MindShare one. You've got your purple swirly bits. But the transition to the block, all-caps block font is so grounding and strong, I feel happier about the company just looking at the new logo (and I don't even know what they do).

Notice that many of the new ones have rounded edges, and the widths of the individual lines remain the same throughout the curves of the letter, giving them a 2 dimensional, warm appearance. Xerox is a good example. In the old logo, see how the lines are thinner in some places, and how the new one is completely different? There's something so stable and friendly in this fad in fonts.

I've never tried to make my own but I'm getting interested...though, as with my photoshop projects, I'd probably just modify one already done, or recreate an expensive one (like Gotham, the Obama font....*drool*).

I feel like I need to pick up a book on the topic or join a font geek board somewhere. Anyone have any insight into this stuff, or just have an appreciation for typography?

I preferred the Walmart logo with the star in it.

Mindshare is beaut !!

Agreed about the old Wal*Mart logo.

Best Buy is really dumb to change from that iconic logo. Other ones I like, although some, like the Discovery Channel, I don't much see the point in changing it. I mean, yeah the new iteration is slightly better, but is it better enough to warrant the change?

Sorry, I know this is supposed to be about fonts...

I love fonts. LOVE them. I will spend a good hour every now and then downloading more I've discovered. I download them for no specfic purpose in mind - other then I love fonts.

I've only ever paid for a handful of them - retro ones that I wanted to use for a specific purpose... the two I used were Chicken Basket and Cocktail Script and I still like those... but I need to go find more. This thread has made me itchy for new ones.

Last count I was up to about 4000 of them. I thought that was bad until I had a guy online about 2 years ago helping out with a logo design who informed me he had over 10,000 of them.

So no, you're not the only one with a thing for fonts.

Even the "plain" font you use in business letter can set the tone of it - happy? serious? The right font can help get that across.

One of my favorite font places is fontdiner.com. A few free fonts - lot's you can buy - and all so very kewl.

Fonts are our Friends.




I don't think all those logo changes were for the better, but I think changing up is good in itself sometimes. (Um, unless you go from a really cool and famous logo to a lame one with zero recognition factor.)

As always, interesting to see different reactions to the same thing. I would have listed Mindshare as one of the less successful changes (but not nearly so bad as Animal Planets) on that page.

Long strings of all cap are annoying to read. In a quick glance my eye now almost fails to differentiate the letters as such and it turns into a rectangular block of white. Pragmatically, its used of subtly shifting colors will be a bitch to reproduce across various formats and will lose a lot when forced into places that just isn't possible. And the use of white on a colored background means that either your logo needs to carry around its framing with it everywhere it goes or you'll have to use a different presentation.

Though I did just visit their web site and can't find an instance where the logo is presented in white lettering on a purple shield so maybe your link site doesn't present it as it is intended to be used. The version on a white background with black lettering is better (though the lengthy word in tight all caps still fails for me). However, at least in their online presentation those two overlapping discs are animated. I put that in the category of epic fail.

Heh, I know exactly the fonts you're talking about, and I've drooled over fontdiner many a time. I think I first came across that site when we were designing the LoT logo.

Funny, since I wasn't the one who actually did the logo I don't know the fonts involved...Erica? Hmm, I may need to dig around. Anyone have a copy of the old logo?

Alex - so I guess you're not a fan of Gotham, though the letters aren't close together. I often like all-caps fonts.

I am not a fan of the new Animal Planet logo at all, it looks like a mess to me.

The animal planet reminds me a dead animal with the letter on it's side.

Dang, I've found the .png file for the logo, but not the .psd. Don't know where I kept that, if I did.

The new Walmart logo looks like it's advertising a cellphone company.

I too love fonts. Back in the day of Letraset, before the all-powerful PC changed the design world forever, I would pore over those books in search of the right one for the project at hand, and had a knack for finding it. There is a font related art exhibit opening or just opened in L.A. It was featured on boingboing.net.

I am also keen on artists who produce work that emphasize the word and how it's presented - giving the word more weight or stripping it down so that is is a beautiful object devoid of meaning. Projecting sentences, in large blocks of light, onto buildings...

If you are interested, there are definitely classes in font design. I met a Yale student who was even majoring in font design.

I love reading a book printed in a pleasing or approproate font, and how the design is usually credited at the back. A lot of thought goes in to picking the right look.

Awesome post, CP.

Now that you posted that, I can't see it any other way. I guess what bugs about this change is what does the 'M' on its side supposed to mean? It kinda looks like a '3'.

There's nothing wrong with Best Buy changing from an iconic logo...if they had come up with something worthwhile to change to. That one just looks like crap.

I'm not opposed to all caps, but that does not mean all caps is always good. And I think "mindshare" all by itself in a sea of nothing is too long to benefit from it and long enough to suffer for it.

When it comes to design, there is but one universal: No matter what, someone will hate it.

But I'll admit my biases may be influenced from struggling with medieval Russian in college. Which was handwritten in all caps and with no spaces between words.

There's something ironic about a site touting the virtues of good design having their column spacing fouled up.

As part of my college education (Graphic Communication), I took a class called "Design With Type." We didn't get into font design, but more about the usage/selection of fonts in creating an overall look. We also got into kerning (the space between letters), leading (spacing between lines of type), etc. Not only does the font itself have visual impact, but how it is presented as well.

One of the things I was fascinated with is the adjustment made to individual characters depending on their size. If one blows up a 6 pt. version of a character and compares it to a 48 point version of the same letter, there are subtle differences to account for visual acuity.

One downside of the mass availability of information is how poorly it is sometimes presented. HTML, et. al. isn't perfect. But even a lot of printed items are just attrocious. A coworker (a former Adobe instructor and graphic artist) and I often just cry when we see some of the garbage that we are printing.

Even more than the font updates, I find it striking how many of those lean towards gradient/shadowing (which I'm not fond of; similar to online graphic designs that use reflections - wow, that's some shiny internet) and how many put more emphasis on oversized icons instead of the words. Tasty D Lite, Walmart, Mindshare, Stop n Shop, Woolworths, Quikcheck, Xerox... plus others, to a lesser extent.

I do love fonts, though, and find it all fascinating.

I believe most know about it. But if not, I recommend watching Helvetica, a documentary about, well, the history and use of the Helvetica font. (It is available for instant viewing on Netflix, which is how I watched it.)

It's very interesting and the people in it will demonstrate just how incompletely you love fonts.

One of the painful realities is that flashy fonts and other gimmicks are often used in place of intelligent and creative design ideas. Too many people are suckered in by the flashiness of something, realizing that it would not have long-term staying power.

I see that in a lot of web-site design. People put all sorts of Flash animation and other dazzling effects without realizing that it takes away from the impact of the message. I am not saying that capturing someones attention and the use of these tools is a bad thing: I am just saying that it is so often done in a way that often distracts from the message that one is trying to communicate.

By the way, since we're on the subject of fonts:

If you are one of those people who send workplace emails in Comic Sans, you will be eliminated when I take over the world.

If you are one of those people who use comic sans for communication in other less formal channels you will be sent to a re-education camp when I take over the world.

If you are one of those people who will respond to this post saying some version of "ah, but I like comic sans" then I won't wait until I take over the world.

Can you please add to your list, along with the Comic San users, anyone who uses a background in their emails?

MOMA had a display about the 50th anniversary of Helvetica last year.

Douglas Hofstadter has written quite a bit about fonts and typeface. His slant is towards how it relates to machine intelligence and if it's theoretically possible to create determinate models to distinguish between letters programatically, but he also just generally likes the topic of fonts. The book Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern is a collection of columns he wrote, so you can skip to just the ones about type if you don't want to wade through all his other stuff (though everything else is fascinating as well, even if he is a little too obsessed with Rubiks).

Here is the font exhibit (House Industries!) in Los Angeles.

AMEN!

And I'm with Kevy and the backgrounds too. Especially when they are black with white text and hit reply and can't read a thing because I don't have mine set to use white text too.

Not only do I like Comic Sans (though I hardly use it any more), I also like the new Animal Planet Logo.



Send the Hit Man now, if you dare!

I like Palatino Linotype.

But I can't explain why, I just do.

:)

Bleah - I hate Comic Sans more than I hate Papyrus.

Ah, I had to go to Word to see what Comic Sans and Papyrus looked like.
I agree. Bleh!

And what's with this "Verdana" font. Horrible... People who use it are really lame...


What?


Oh.


Love Verdana!

Oh, I actually like Papyrus when the font is small, especially when typing a person's name.

Hahah, I LOVE Papyrus!


Some people clearly have no font taste.




And, no, I don't mean me. :p


< of course, i'm rather partial to Bridges of America font, but only when used sparingly and for protest.

See, for me, it's just lazy shorthand for "we're trying to be zen." It's overused. Especially in the cheeseball amateur context noted so well by iheartpapyrus.com

Though, Helvetica is certainly used a great deal, and I quite like it.

It is actually a very feminine font. (And to be pedantic, the "Linotype" portion of the name is the name of the foundry and not really required to identify the font. In fact, it may not be correct if you are not using Linotype's Palatino. All of the major foundries have a Palatino.)

I know I am in the minority, but I really despise Helvetica.

Oh, how fun. Dissecting personality traits by font preferences. This is great.

My fav font is Tahoma.

What does that say about me Dr. Kevy?


(Other than I obviously have certain masochists tendencies to ask something like that in the first place... )

That you have a propensity for lying: especially in on-line signatures. :D

Actually, Palatino is the only one I remember because I am such a fan of it.

Shocking.

Argh. This is making me want to change up my logo which is still new. And, I also have enough backlog on my plate to finish.

Love the concepts though!

Dig. :snap: And terminology, yay! :)

I've been putting off seeing this - thanks for the reminder. GD gets to blame you when he is forced to watch this.

I use Comic Sans in comic contexts. I resisted using comic/anime inspired fonts in my Teen Zone signage. So. Over. It. Using Comic Sans for communique? Bwahaha. The background users suck, too.

I've been partial to Book Antiqua forever but am now finally over it. I think I need a new basic font. I do like Palatino. Helvetica is a bit too harsh for my taste. Garamond is still cool (The font of Harry Potter, if I'm not mistaken).

Anyone know any geeky font sites? I'll post some later...

http://ilovetypography.com/


http://abc.planet-typography.com/index.html

http://www.flickr.com/groups/folktype/pool/

http://www.smileycat.com/miaow/archi...-headlines.php

http://www.houseind.com/

http://www.craigoldham.co.uk/ (http://www.craigoldham.co.uk/ongoing/ampersands/)

Uh, I AM the one who recommended a book about typeface...

Call me old fashioned, but I routinely use Times New Roman.

For regular writing/reading of large text I don't like serifs so the first thing I do when getting a new work computer is kill Times New Roman as the default font.

So long as it is relatively unadorned and sans serif I am fine. Which usually means Arial. Not out of any strong preference though, just better than the generally used alternatives.

As a plain font, I had a thing with calibri for awhile.

Maiandra is a nice happy simply font that has a little personality but isn't overly floofy.

Berlin Sans too.

I don't use those fonts to print up letters or documents though. More with signage, website headlines etc.

I use Arial as my default, but I hate the "unisex" quotation marks, like the ones I just used.

If I need quotation marks, I want proper ones and I'll switch to Times Roman as default.

We recently got the Office 07 upgrade at work and I dig Calibri as a default. I never liked Times at all.

I <3 EH! :D Awesome linkage.

I've always liked Georgia.

Boring...but there it is.


I really like its name origin :D :



I also quite like Verdana.

I could really get into the name origin aspect of fonts:

Oh don't even get me started on font names. They can get so creative. Snipple, Girls are Wierd, Blackadder, Chicken Basket. They come up with great names.

I never thought to look up why they were called that way though. I'll have to check that out.

Hahahahah:

Hair Care or Digital Audio Logo Quiz

Yep, I'm a huge font fan. I think it comes from doing old wax-roller layouts for newsletters and pamphlets back when Alex was still in diapers. OK not that long ago. But I started in undergraduate school and switched from wax to computer.

I started doing desktop publishing using Aldus Pagemaker 2.0. And fell in love with the ability to use different fonts (up until then I was only familiar with machines running DOS).

Quick: What font did the Obama campaign use for its primary signage?


It's just too damn bad they want to charge me $200 for the basic set! Argh.

Not to nitpick, but let's give credit where credit is due. It wasn't AT ALL the PC. It was the Mac!!!

Papyrus has its place.

The problem with most font usage (as Kevy alluded to) is that most people have absolutely no clue how to use the fonts in their library.

It's kind of like someone who can barely boil water, going into a kitchen to cook a meal and discovering an entire cabinetful of spices. They have absolutely no idea what each one is like, how they work together, how some need to be used in very small quantities, how some work well together or don't, etc.

"Ahh, look, let's add white pepper, cardamon, cinammon, thyme, allspice, sea salt, Chinese mustard, brown sugar, and a quarter cup of this pretty saffron stuff."

There was this comic company called CrossGen that was pretty big back around 2000 and they had a real nice Ying/Yang logo that was prominently displayed on the top left-hand corner of all their books. It was a good logo. About 6 months or so before they went out of business they changed their logo into one that was, IMHO, pretty unattractive. Once it changed it was very unidentifiable. Makes me think how logo/font changed folks opinion of the "product."


Also, remember when they changed the Disneyland font?

13/14 right. Funny quiz.

Ah, how I miss Annual Reports. This was for a while some of the best creative design and printing to be found. Alas, many companies are shying away from spending the money the used to on these gems.

Sadly (for me) only 12 out of 14. The two that threw me were Pureology and Ashampoo (I should have known that latter one would be a trick!)

I still want to take a day off and field trip to your place o' work fun.

I used to LOVE fonts and spent a lot of time choosing my fonts for the publications I created very carefully. I have great admiration for well placed and well used fonts.

Then came message boards....and sig lines. Sigh.

I have a couple of press checks coming up in December

People have sig lines?

What about kicklines?

Ah Pagemaker. My long lost love. It's been a long time.

Woo! Let me know.

http://www.fortheloveoftype.blogspot.com/

And

http://gemmaobrien.com/

I spent five years working closely with a woman who emailed exclusively in bold, deep purple comic sans.

Trust me, I've long singe learned to suppress my annoyance until the day I rule the world and can unleash my vengeance. Until then I just use it as a handy indicator of the mildly retarded.

VAM!

NO.

I will not permit it.

I don't understand why Comic Sans has such a bad rap. I usally type everything in Arial as a default, because it's the plainest font in existence and thus, i assume, the most legible. I find comic sans just a slightly jazzier version that has a teeny tiny bit of ooomph while losing none of the plain-wrap legibility.


But whatever ... sheesh, fontelitists.

Is it true that those short school buses ride smoother than the long ones? I always wondered.

Or, yes. Yes, go ahead. Show us all your incredible lack of taste. That's all right. I'll wipe the blood from my eyes.

And yours.

Comic Sans is what people use for signage for tacky craft faires - and spell Fair as Faire.

Hmm, i don't think it looks Craftish at all. But if you spell it "Faire" without an Olde English type font, you have serious problems.

Wait, could you say that again, iSm.

OMG, they took it away??

Bless you!

Sheesh! The admins are evil here.







(and it wasn't me - I don't "rule", remember)

I see nothing evil in that move.

I use to have a supervisor who wrote all her emails in a cutesy script font (I don't remeber which one) in lavender. It drove us crazy.

Oh... and she is another crazy cat lady. I seem to attract them.

I heard they also disabled Hot Male Avatars.





I was wondering what happened to them.

Never fear! They shall return!

Like THIS Admin would ever allow anything with "hot men" as a descriptor to disappear from LoT.

My corporation has its own special font that we are supposed to use on all official documents. You have probably seen it.

Comic Sans?

Not that anyone is carrying a grudge or anything :eek:

Okay, how about:

Here is a picture that could be called the opposite of "hot men"

I am so disappointed in you, Kevy. ;)

One of my favorites fonts is Macintosh named after Scottish architect Charles Rennie Macintosh. It's beautiful in it's own right but because it's so highly stylized, it's not very practical for text. I think it looks best used for signage, titles or labels.

There was a fellow architect at the place I used to work who would use his rapidiograph to hand letter ALL of his faxes in Macintosh. It drove the secretaries crazy, because they just wanted to send out a reply to our clients as quickly as possible. Mario refused to let them type the replies for him and insisted on hand lettering each one. He was one of the best draughtsmen we had and the clients LOVED the individual attention they received from him. Every fax he sent out looked like a piece of art, like some old English manuscript. I think he even used the enlarged initials at the beginning of each one.

Just because it's a good excuse, the exterior of the Macintosh School of Art in Glasgow, the first building designed by Charles (no photos allowed inside, sadly):

Yes, we know you've been there... Rub it in some more, whydontcha... :(

Excellent, I finally found the original logo file. The fonts used in the LoT logo are "Indubitably" (Lounge), "QuigleyWiggly" (of), "Concielian" (Tomorrow), and "DymaxionScript" (adventure through inner swank).

A fine job y'all did on the logo!

SMeltery. Free fonts.

Typography! Libraries! Trees!

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crbl...of-dead-trees/

Think you know your fonts?
Take Aim

First try - 31,100. How about you?

Worse than that.

Yeah - I tried it a few more times and didn't do nearly as good. Maybe I just got lucky with familiar fonts the first time around. Or maybe I'm just a super cool font girl. ;)

37,667. But that was the 4th time I played. Heh.

56,297

:blush:

70,600. And that's my high score. Now, back to work!

I bow to your font geekness! :snap:

I did play about 10 times in a row; you start to memorize the ones you missed before. :) Wish I could pass more levels. Wonder if the number of fonts that show increases...

w00t! With some practice, I hit 132,474

There are only about 10 fonts I think, so it's not terribly difficult to memorize them all.

I bow to your fonty-ness.

79,467 - first try.

0. I suck! :)

I'm not sure if this has been posted here before......Google Maps Fonts:

I did post that a while ago...makes me want to find that post because it included a link to a site that would convert any phrase into the font.

Another Font Quiz. I got 7/10, better than I expected.

I read this and thought of this thread.

But I LIKE Copperplate!

I also got 7/10, w00t.

It bashes Verdana, which is our default posting font. Heh.

I think we should make Wingdings the default font.

... But only on the posts about how wonderful the new Star Trek movie is... :evil:

Wow!

Here's a shirt for you font geeks.

I think I figured out why you ended up there. :D

ETA - Dude!

I know it's off-topic, but CP's post above reminded me that I really want to buy one of these shirts.

I think Chris needs the Be Seeing You shirt as well as the "Brazil" shirt.

What a cool find, J! I love these because on a lot of them you have to be a huge fan of the film to understand the reference. Coolness!!

I want this one:
Where are you going? Swimming!!

and

this one.
:)

Cheese or Font?

Eh, I would like to see her do Kanji Type





Seriously though, those are cool. Now, if I didn't hate Helvetica so much...

And why the heck does my dictionary not recognize "Helvetica"?

Awesome!

Really cool!

That might chafe. Cool stuff, though :)

Fatal Error? Muscle Tension? Overload?

Poor guy.

Ugh - I need to read this thread - how did I miss out on reading it?

I'm working to find a font - preferably for cheap/free and it reminded me that this existed. Little did I know it had so much to satisfy my geekery!

Back to one of the earliest posts from CP - yes, it was Michael and I that worked on the logo. I have my doubts that the original files are in my possession (reasons many will understand)--- but perhaps somewhere in the archives of L & C? Or I could go begging...

I may have the fonts somewhere.

Matchbook and Matchbook Serif - free

HYPERACTIVITYPOGRAPHY - It's a typography activity/workbook.

From an industry newsletter:

OooooooOOOOOOOOoooooooo! :D

Hee hee: you were the first person I thought of when I saw this. Enjoy!

This is technically out of the scope of "art", but I thought readers of this thread would appreciate this kind of humor. NSFW due to language only.

Heh, digging around at the site brought me this, which reminds me of GC. :)

NSFW.

No pugs?!

Chernabog needs to see there is Bjork font!

Weird, I disagree with most of their choices. Cute idea though.

The pug is Times. He is just a black pug.

Need a font? Try this "handy" flowchart

My daughter's wall (it's lyrics to a Jonas Brothers song. Nick is still her favorite musician of all time. She's been a little obsessed for 4 or 5 years.)


A little bit longer and I'll be fine wall by bettycancook, on Flickr

I missed this before. I enjoyed it - especially the path for comic sans (which seems to be hated by 100% of anyone in graphic design - which makes it pretty funny to ask "Are you alone?". :D

She made that? Awesome work!

It's cut from magazine pages. I like it - and I love that it's not all left justified. She's trying to think of something to do for her other wall.

I'm font twitterpated today.

http://blog.imaginaryfoundation.com/...ographical+Art

Love it!

Pardon my font if this is a repeat but you've played around with llama font? It's SFW.

Very architectural. Cool.

Damn. It's down now.

It's back up.

Lamarific
 

I had not seen it before, wonderful wonderful!

Try this page.

Fourth one down. The Bacon Font.

How have we lived without that.

87/100. I was off on the first 2 but hit 100 on several too.

I was somewhere around 87 as well. It was fairly forgiving. Among other things I think it gave more credit to how the movable letters were placed in relation to each other than it gave to how they were placed in relation to the fixed letters (i.e., if ALL 4 letters that you could move were off by 6 pixels to the left, then it considered that 100%).

I have a Bachelor's degree in printing ("Graphic Communication") and one of the classes I took was called "Design with Type." I learned all sorts of fascinating minutia about fonts. One of our assignments was creating a one sheet with a poem or some other text along with an image behind it. Besides the layout challenge, we had to use a system where the kerning was turned off and we had to manually code ALL of the kerning.

So far, I haven't had the patience to take the test GD linked to to see if I retained any of those skills.

Another mostly useless factoid I learnt was that in Postscript (and most proper vector-based typesetting protocols), the details of each character vary ever so slightly depending on the point size; this was demonstrated by outputting the same character (same font obviously) in a 6 point and a 72 point size, then blowing up the 6 point character to the same visual size as the 72 point character to display them side-by-side. When comparing, you would see where the stroke might vary, the transition of a crossbar was more filled in on one, etc.

Another assignment was programming in raw Postscript coding. While searching for a visual illustration of the font size difference, I ran across the image below. I remember creating an image exactly like the one on the left side of this image. EXACTLY!

89. If that's all that kerning involves and it can be done that well with about 8 seconds of effort on each one (I assume that's not actually the case) then typesetters need to stop proclaiming they've accomplished anything all that noteworthy.

93. I completely blew one of them.

80%

The Type Fight sight isn't loading correctly for me so I'm not sure I am correct about what it is doing, but how does one decide which font is better without the context of a specific use?

Most fonts are good fonts for something (except comic sans).

Shape Type, way harder than the Kerning Game. I only got 71%.

I got 71% too!

Please "Like" Typenow on facebook - they've gone away for a little while and we want them to know we love them !!!

The link isn't working at the moment (I think it is making the rounds on Facebook, so their server may be a bit overwhelmed), but Comicraft Presents The World's Greatest Comic Book Fonts

Nice find! Such cool fonts, I want them all.

Cats as fonts

heh

Free. Kin. Awesome!
It bugs the crap out of me when rn looks like an m. So glad to have a word for this phenomenon.

I was thinking about this yesterday when I was surprised to find a "Homo Hill" in Camp Pendleton

Not that "Horno Hill" is much better.

Every time I see this storefront in DTD, I think, "Bunk? Who would name a store Bunk?"



Not "keming," just a bad font.

Had the exact same reaction when I saw it.

Reminds me of the famous Megaflicks sign (NSFW)

OMG! You went there.

http://xkcd.com/1015/ Kerning

Unfortunate Text Placement (NSFW)

That's either pathetic (for missing it) or laudable (for sneaking it in).

From a friends Facebook post, I just had to share it here.....

VLBM because that was fraking hilarious and I need to spread more before giving you actual mojo

Never noticed this before, but now it shall bug me forever

Wow, I've seen that logo for 40+ years and never noticed that before.

Well... The V could be either.

The fact that you didn't notice it is a good argument for doing it. It maintains a visual consistency that we naturally accept.

I googled it and that's the basic answer the company gave. It was a suggestion from one of the graphic designers working on the logo, thought it looked better. Nothing more than that.

Mea Oblivious Culpa.

Anyone have a few hundred quid I can borrow?

You can always use this one: http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs70/f/20...er-d36x4ur.png

That circus is well down on my time travel list, but it's on there.

Font Conference

and Font Fight

Macula, the impossible font.

I freakin' love that!

That was fascinating! It also explained where a lot of these font names and terms I've heard used for many years come from.
Thank you for posting that CP!

Handmade Type
a typographic experiment by Tien-Min Liao
Please check out the page, but here is just one example:

The part that showed real dedication was waiting for 30 days between each letter for the sharpie marker to finally slough off completely.

This is great. The serifs and thicknesses of the strokes make this worth checking out.

Hah, cool idea!

Cool idea, but how do you know exactly where to make the cuts?

Rad!

Beard Font correlations:

Yahoo's new logo. What a joke! It looks just about as bad as any logo I've tried to make.

My view on logos has always been that a good logo is:

80% Corporate success - If Google had used the exact same design for their logo in 1997 it would now be viewed as a work of classic marketing genius.

15% Longevity - Builds to a degree on the 80% since it is hard to have longevity without success but regardless of how "bad" a logo is, if you have it for 40 years people will think it is perfect representation of your company.

5% Design - This is the part that people get paid for, so they try to make it sound much more important than it is to the success of a logo.

Yahoo's new logo is totally meh. But I did like the little animation they did with the exclamation point swooping through the O.
_______________________________________

On a totally different note, I thought this CAPTCHA-like typeface was interesting.

Could they have done better? I'm curious because I can't remember a single example (seriously, examples would be most welcome) of a well-known established company introducing a new logo to wide acclaim. The best I ever seem to see is "Yeah, ok."

FedEx is one I can think of where improvement was strong and clear and while at this point we probably can't imagine going back to 1993 and the old logo, I don't recall it getting much talk in those nascent Internet days.

(And I'm definitely not saying a logo can be improved from a pure aesthetic point of view, just that I don't think aesthetics have much to do with the success of a logo.)

I agree. Yahoo is my home page, and I noticed it right off. I think the old logo had a lot more character, and the new one is pretty plain and boring.

I think when it's done well, people don't stand up and cheer, they think it's a natural extension of the brand, and don't really notice it in a major way.

There are some good ones here. UPS, Starbucks, Sprint, Google, BP, all good.

Never mind. I feel like I'm being bitchy and argumentative lately. So I'll just delete that and move on with life.

We wouldn't have you any other way, Alex.

VAM for self-awareness and editing and moving on and another VAM for being wonderfully argumentative. Because sometimes I just crave confrontation on subjective concepts.

Does it really count as two Visible Mojos when I put them in one post?

Fried Egg Font made with actual fried eggs

New favorite blog http://typesetinthefuture.com/