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Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use.

via About – cufon – GitHub.

I’m totally getting a NOEL JACKSON raised metal sign for my door. Just to let the Joan in the office know what’s up.

Then there is the Gill Sans c. 1930 problem. Gill is used quite a lot in the series, mainly for Sterling Cooper Advertising’s logo and signage. Technically, this is not anachronistic. And the way the type is used—metal dimensional letters, generously spaced—looks right. The problem is that Gill was a British typeface not widely available or popular in the U.S. until the 1970s. It’s a decade ahead of its time in American type fashions.

via Mark Simonson Studio / Notebook: Mad Men, Mad Props.

At the heart of the game of cat-and-mouse played by bloggers and spammers is Captcha, purveyor of those staticky demands to enter the code exactly as shown above.

via Ask H&FJ | Hoefler & Frere-Jones

I love getting font foundry emails.

FontFont recently sent me one with these two gems (oldies but goodies):

Ayres Royal

New Standard

• Sakura, is what the Japanese call cherry blossom trees. Jeff has a gallery of his adventures during Sakura season over on his blog.
• Matt alerted me that the myth about the slow-boild frog, is false.
• 

  Zombie Strippers! [trailer] An advertisement on the back of the actually pretty good comic book release, Jenna Jameson’s Shadow Hunter (seriously, it’s not bad, maybe even good), advertised a non porn film, starring Jenna Jameson, titled Zombie Strippers!

• You can now find all of Daft Punk’s live sets all in one place.
• You Work For Them, the people who brought you “Black Sabbath”, have a really nice blog.
• Apple FINALLY updated the Airport Express to be 802.11n! No more dropped tunes!
• Some insane RC helicopter action:
  

She’s on “the Facebook” now.

She’s also got this ridiculous video for Wanderlust.

Her graphic designer is a king at modern typography, hence his domain name: http://www.moderntypography.com/

What does Björk not do to the nines?

Classic typography is being used quite cunningly by, what appears to be, a Coudal designed, SEED Conference Website.

It pulls on old style typsetting. Using, to great affect on Readability, all forms of typographic style, for example, using italics for emphasis on space and topic in the first title sentence.

I attended the first SEED Conference and found it, surprisingly, to be one of the most important talks I’ve encountered. It’s a conference that is truly a gathering of wonderful minds.

Related, when searching Wikipedia for “Typography” I came across a “A specimen of roman typefaces by William Caslon”¹.

A specimen of roman typefaces by William Caslon

Captioning Sucks! is a microsite about captioning, and why it sucks!

Joe Clark approached me to design and build the site. His request: “garish and vulgar.” So, eight6 went to town.

It was an odd request, and an awkwardly challenging one. Aside from wrangling with Comic Sans and coming out victorious, I got to play around with some alpha-transparency and I think the result is pretty interesting. This site was one of my favorites to design… It’s not every day you get to do this kind of work! And now, I can finally say, “I got a client to use Comic Sans!”

I want to point out, that this is the kind of stuff I really enjoy and one of the main reasons I started eight6. We don’t just want to design, we want to move the world forward through design. (Yeah, it sounds corny.) Captioning Sucks! is a perfect example of balancing graphical conventions and implementing contextual design. It’s vulgar appearance helps emphasize the importance of the project’s goals.

Go find out why Captioning Sucks!