Gerrymandering Fonts

If the exact intersection of your interests is graphic design and a deeply abiding hatred of partisan gerrymandering, then have I got the font for you: pic.twitter.com/w1j6iQvANh

— Morgan Baskin (@mhbaskin) August 1, 2019

RIP Hermann Zapf (1918–2015)

Hermann Zapf, who designed several well-known fonts (e.g., Zaph Dingbats, Palatino) died on 4 June. I don't think I had ever seen his font Zapfino before; it's really nice! I have used Palatino on many occasions.

(Tip of the cap to Jimmy Lin.)

Font Battles and a Childhood Fascination with Fonts

According to Sang Hoon Lee, the journal club for our collaborator Beom Jun Kim has devolved to include font battles in the slides that the speakers are employing. He posted a picture on Facebook to prove it. (I realize that most of you will not be able to access that picture; I am including it here for my own reference so that I don't need to go elsewhere to look it up.)

This reminds me of something: When I was a kid, I bought the program Fontastic so that I could design fonts without going into Resource Editor (aka: ResEdit) and destroying the systems on my disks (and needing to wipe them clean) in the process. I bought Fontastic as a toy. In short: I could totally win a font battle. You can read a bit about Fontastic in the Wikipedia entry about its sequel ("Fontographer"): "In December 1984, James R. Von Ehr founded the Altsys Corporation to develop graphics applications for personal computers. The first foray by Altsys into commercial font editing software was a bitmap font editor called Fontastic, released in the mid-1980s for the Apple Macintosh. The program, developed by Altsys founder Jim von Ehr, was able to edit the native bitmap font format of the Mac."

Yes, I really was editing fonts on my computer at the age of 8. It's really no wonder that I am still very anal about such things. (None of my fonts were any good, but that's a different issue.)

Comic Sans Strikes Back

Seriously, this is brilliant.

(Tip of the cap to Mark Rogers.)

The Neuroscience of Comic Sans

The Onion has decided to delve into the deep, dark secrets of the neuroscience of Comic Sans. (I love the new center at Princeton!)

Italics

This demotivational poster is awesome! I know I'm a geek, but I love font jokes.

Somebody needs to build on this with a joke that involves Comic Sans. :)

How to Pick a Perfect Font

Fresh from the pages of Gizmodo, here is a chart for how to pick the perfect font.

This chart includes the best use of Comic Sans ever. I couldn't find Geneva in there, however. :)

(Tip of the cap to Louis Wang.)