A student at Tama Art University in Japan named Mayuko created a western font composed of leg hair (presumably not her own). It’s not the easiest to read, but may well go down in typographical records as the strangest -at least the strangest font to actually be used commercially! Shown here is a Adidas ad using the leg hair font. Link -via Smart Stop

Henry Hargreaves made a font out of bacon! No, it’s not just a bacon font, each letter was constructed from real bacon, as you can see:

It was a joint effort: Photography and direction by Henry Hargreaves, styling by Sarah Guido. See closeups of each letter at his website. Link

Watching my kids learning how to read made me truly appreciate how difficult it can be to distinguish letters of the Roman alphabet. If you think about it, a lot of the letters are truly alike - b and p are the same thing with different rotation, v and w look almost the same and so on. Dyslexics have even greater trouble because their brains constantly "mix up" these letters.

There's a lot we now know on how to help treat dyslexics, but can our choice of letterform help? Christian Boer of studiostudio, a graphic designer with dyslexia, has created a font called "Dyslexie" that is designed to emphasize the differences between similar letters to make it easier for dyslexics to read.

The result is encouraging: "The study at the University of Twente showed that people with dyslexia made fewer reading errors when they use the dyslexia font compared to using standard font."

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Boston Globe

It’s a simple quiz game. It gives you a word, and you decide whether it’s a cheese or  font. How hard could this be? After all, I buy cheese at the grocery store and I have many fonts on my computer. Surprise! There are way more of both in the world than I realized. Link -Thanks, Ginny Turner!

Click Andrew’s name to enlarge his work.

via Twisted Sifter

Today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss is a continuation of the popular TypeFace/Off series in which you identify something by its distinctive font. We’ve tried movies, TV shows, board games, and now video games. Can you recognize them from the typeface, even if the actual words are different? Link

Once again: if you want to be taken seriously, don’t use the Comic Sans font in your passive-aggressive notes. Link -via I Met a Possum

Turn your handwriting into a font! Pilot Pens asks you to use your ink pen at least once more to write out your letters, then feed them into their font generator. Download your personal font, and then you can type with your own handwriting! Link -via Core77 -Thanks, Senor Mysterioso!

Today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss continues the popular Typeface/Off series with more brands and products you should be able to guess by the font only. Beware, the words say Mental Floss, not the product name. Spelling counts, but there is a list of answers you can highlight. I scored 80%, as I switched the two candy bars. Link

John D. Sutter of CNN writes:

Dear computer users: If you’re ever going to write a fuming letter, think twice before setting the font to the oh-so-mockable Comic Sans.

Take it from Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, the NBA team that lost its star basketball player, LeBron James, on Thursday night.

After Gilbert posted a rant — in the cutesy Comic Sans typeface — about James’ departure on NBA.com, bloggers, newspaper writers and Twitter pundits lashed back with a collective message that essentially said this:

Unless you’re a fourth-grader, or being ironic, or the author of a comic book, or on vacation from the 1990s, never use that typeface.

On Twitter, discussion of Gilbert’s font choice briefly trumped the debate about James’ move to the Miami Heat, according to the blog TechCrunch, which posted a screen grab of the trending topics from that messaging site.

Link

Previously on Neatorama: The History of Comic Sans | Font Conference

Last week’s quiz on movie poster fonts was a lot of fun… how about trying it with TV shows? Today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss does just that. Try to guess the TV show (or network) by the typeface used in the title alone. This time, you have a list of the shows to select from on the blog post -IF you want to use them. I only scored 70%, but I was in a hurry. I got all the old shows correct! Link

Because different fonts require different amounts of ink to print, you could be buying new printer cartridges less often if you wrote in, say, Century Gothic rather than Arial. Schools and businesses could save thousands of dollars with font changes. [...]

When Printer.com tested popular fonts for their ink-friendly ways, Century Gothic and Times New Roman topped the list. Calibri, Verdana, Arial and Sans Serif were next, followed by Trebuchet, Tahoma and Franklin Gothic Medium. Century Gothic uses about 30 percent less ink than Arial.

The amount of ink a font drains is mainly driven by the thickness of its lines. A font with "narrow" or "light" in its name is usually better than its "bold" or "black" counterpart, said Thom Brown, an ink researcher at Hewlett-Packard Co., the world’s top maker of printers.

Link

I, for one, am sticking to Comic Sans regardless of the cost!

That’s pretty intuitive albeit overly simple – but does cognitive fluency really factor into our daily lives? Perhaps more than you’re even aware of, according to this article by Drake Bennett of The Boston Globe:

Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. [...]

One thing that fools us, for example, is font. When people read something in a difficult-to-read font, they unwittingly transfer that sense of difficulty onto the topic they’re reading about. Schwarz and his former student Hyunjin Song have found that when people read about an exercise regimen or a recipe in a less legible font, they tend to rate the exercise regimen more difficult and the recipe more complicated than if they read about them in a clearer font.

Link

Photo: Andrew Byrom

Designer Andrew Byrom has developed a font derived from Venetian blinds opened and closed at various angles and lengths. Byrom, a native of Liverpool, UK, studied design at the Cumbria Institute of Art and Design and now teaches at California State University in Los Angeles. He has won numerous awards for his typographical work in the past few years.

Link via DudeCraft | Artist’s Website

In a way, typography has come full circle – what started as a physical process of setting type in machines has been rediscovered as a physical art by a number of creative photographers and designers. Some of these unusual real-life alphabetic collections were found and photographed in nature while others were acted out, constructed or assembled from bodies and objects but all ten sets of type yield compelling images.

Link

The proliferation of Comic Sans is something of a fluke. In 1994, Mr. Connare was working on a team at Microsoft creating software that consumers eventually would use on home PCs. His designer’s sensibilities were shocked, he says, when, one afternoon, he opened a test version of a program called Microsoft Bob for children and new computer users. The welcome screen showed a cartoon dog named Rover speaking in a text bubble. The message appeared in the ever-so-sedate Times New Roman font.

Mr. Connare says he pulled out the two comic books he had in his office, "The Dark Knight Returns" and "Watchmen," and got to work, inspired by the lettering and using his mouse to draw on a computer screen. Within a week, he had designed his legacy.

A product manager recognized the font’s appeal and included it as a standard typeface in the operating system for Microsoft Windows. As home computers became widespread, Comic Sans took on a goofy life of its own.

Link

Modern Mechanix blog spotted this in a copy of Ye Olde (1918!) National Geographic Magazine: an advertisement for a typewriter with variable fonts.

No Other Typewriter Can Do This—

Change instantly from

Miniature Roman to Large Gothic.
Medium Roman to Italics.
Vertical Script to CLARENDON.
English to Russian.
TURKISH TO PUNJABI.

This can be done by “Just Turning the Knob” on the Multiplex Hammond “Writing Machine”

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.