know your c••cuses

i’d like to send a big cyber-five to my squash coach, allan who, while getting his hoopty tuned, was able to program me a computer program which—more or less—outputs reams and reams of words which have similar letters in similar places.

now alls i need to do is befriend somebody else who can program a computer program that will add the tube-style, technicolour lines and then i will be able to retire to the south of france and take up a hobby like metal detectoring beaches for tennis bracelets and rare bottlecaps.

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pre·viously, also: i still don’t have a good name for this series. if you do, i’d love to hear from you. i mean, i’d love to hear from you anyway, though naming this series is a convenient excuse for discourse.

know your t•r•ids

know your mo•g•ls

rice probably

This pronunciation guide is from Où est le garlic? by Len Deighton (1965), the author of The Ipcress File. For anyone who hasn’t heard of The Ipcress File, or of Michael Caine for that matter, here. You’re welcome.

Now that we’re all properly briefed, we can appreciate the intricate genius of Len Deighton: the working man’s John le Carré, primogenitor of Harry Palmer and therefore arguably of Michael Caine’s career, military historian, and occasional cookery columnist for The Observer (London). Throw in his background as an utterly cool art student cat whose parents were ‘in service’ as a chauffeur and a housekeeper-cook, and we begin to get that whiff of early 1960s anti-establishment irreverence, a refusal to kowtow to the status quo that was all the more vicious for its subtlety.

So read this pronunciation guide with all that context informing your font appreciation and vowel sounds, and with Harry Palmer’s vocals reverberating in your cranium. It is pure frang-lays, the lingua franca of the bowler-hatted Brit abroad, priggishly bourgeois and culturally tone deaf. Deighton absolutely nails the plummy droning diphthongs and plodding stresses. Hi-bloody-larious.

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the content and capital letters of this post have been brought to you by the ever plucky ramona ranchera.

emigre has finally released a mr eaves typeface and thus a new character is introduced in the exciting adventures of john baskerville & mrs eaves series.

also, this has allowed me to finally make use of the new sex position that i discovered a year ago.

previously.

whiskey tango foxtrot

for kicks: the next time that you are making reservations over the phone with a maître d’, why not use the unhelpful phonetic alphabet to spell your name? as my former accordion instructor points out, “efficiency is the enemy of serendipity.”

r.i.a.a. affect booger naughty our r.i.a.a. over and out.

phaeton.otf

this summer, my cyberbuddy, kevin cornell (of the superest) released phaeton, a knee-slappingly, eye-telescopingly, ear-steamingly gorgeous old-timey typeface.

i am a sucker for 1—period fonts (especially when the period is victorian or edwardian); 2—hand drawn fonts; and 3—fonts with scads of alternates, ornaments, swash capitals, and catchwords. it should therefore be little surprise that i chose phaeton to be the new official typeface of the ragbag worldwide brand. it has dethroned origami to get to this esteemed position.

update: i have just received word that origami is “doing just fine” and is living in exile in zurich.

further update: from 3rd party accounts, i have learned that origami has taken mrs eaves—the filthy harlot—as his mistress.

i made this for a project in woodshop class and got a d+. major bummer!!!! i ran home and hid under a pile of blankets until it was time for dinner.

why egyptology ownz:

because one of the letters of the egyptian hieroglyphabet is gardiner d53 described as, “phallus with liquid issuing from it.” this glyph shows up in words like “come apart”, “flow”, “twitch”, “wriggle”, “impure fluid”, and “spray”. can you imagine if this was the 27th letter of the roman alphabet?!? oh the fun that we would have…

also: the sumerians had some equally righteous ideograms. (eg. jaritz #919)

(but i did not shoot the drop cap E)

tudza (a cyberbuddy and notorious crank) made this marvelous graphical pun and says:

I copied the idea of course, but while the original… was done in Photoshop, this was done with a Hi-Point 9mm at the local pistol range.

who needs the adobe creative suite when one has access to FIREARMS!?!?

also: does seeing a large s in this way remind anyone else of ulysses?

comic sans & courier

i whipped up this gag derivative to help the layperson distinguish between comic sans and courier. both typefaces start with c-o and that can be very confusing sometimes. one of the key differences is that comic sans looks like it was fingerpainted by my five year old nephew and courier is how neo sees the world in the matrix. next up: a fourteen part series on the very subtle differences among the garamonds. i keed, i keed.

i created this cuz the tawdry ménage à trois among nomenclature, typography, and genetics needs to be made more explicit.

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additional type terms can be found here, here, and especially here. the chromosomal nomenclature that i used is based upon the recommendations of the paris conference of 1971.

arial & helvetica

on friday, i hosted a screening of helvetica for some buddies of mine that didn’t know that there were other typefaces besides times new roman. it turns out, there ARE other typefaces and one of them is helvetica (and another of them is papyrus.)

the documentary does not explore the relationship between helvetica and microsoft’s derivative, arial. so to help ignite the post-viewing dialogue, i made this supplement illustrating the key differences in letterforms. however, in place of any spirited debate, my buddies decided instead to take turns delivering roundhouses to my jaw, saying “a documentary about a font is as interesting as it sounds.” i could not agree more.

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update (9/22/2009): welcome internet-at-large! i am ostrich-feather-tickled that you are finding this chart useful. should you want to see my other type-related posts, you can give this a gentle click. should you want to see a collection of my favourite posts, you can get dirty with this link. should you want to close this tab and see what else is on the internet (hint: pictures of cats), you can hit cmd + w and be on your way.