Swans on Tea

Letter Monsters. A Flickr set

Movie Poster Quiz
Guess the movie from just one letter taken from the movie’s poster (not necessarily the first letter, or most artistically distinct letter that appears). I got five.

Typocalypse
What your font is subliminally saying. Anyone use Didot?
via SwissMiss

22 Creative Alphabets

Pirate Fonts, in preparation for Talk Like a Pirate Day, Sept 19th.
via Neatorama

Using Wordle, the font size of planets and moons, determined by the diameter, at Orbiting Frog

The use of symbols to represent swearing actually has a name: grawlix
[I]t looks to have been coined by Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker around 1964. Though it’s yet to gain admission to the Oxford English Dictionary, OED Editor-at-Large Jesse Sheidlower describes it as “undeniably useful, certainly a word, and one that I’d [...]

Indiana Jones and the Fonts on the Maps
Whenever Indy is traveling great distances, which happens in all the films, there is a montage of the airplane or boat superimposed over an animated map showing the route. It’s an old-fashioned convention, an homage to the movies of the Thirties and Forties. Unfortunately, the typefaces would be [...]

Kerning is the adjustment of the spacing between letter pairs in printing. Improperly done, (overkerning?) this can make letters run together, and e.g. “rn” is difficult to distinguish from “m,” especially for those of us with less-than-perfect eyesight. (And take care not to shove your “L” too close to your “I” since that [...]