I was reading the ilovetypography blog this morning, and they have a few articles on creating your own font. I think I am going to give this a shot – I love drawing, fonts and words – what’s not to love about putting them all together?! Well, I can answer that – the expensive font developing software programs one must buy. So I think I will create my own font that no one else can use because it won’t be a font, it will just be a bunch of Illustrator drawings. Okay, you can use it too. I just really love the idea of creating your own font, then making a poster with it…it’s art, words, and a message on potentially so many layers.

I’m not sure if you follow ilovetypography as fanatically as I do, but here is something I know you will appreciate: the Font Police! This is a blog devoted to bad use of fonts, improper typesetting, and just some general abuses of signage. Finally, a way for me to punish that stupid store downtown that has a sign out front in some godawful version of curlz that says: Fantasys’ Jewel’s. I mean, seriously, I don’t even know what they are trying to sell in there, it could be baby seal pelts, I simply cannot get past the horrible font (which you can’t see, obviously, in this post) or the bizarre use of apostrophes.

Lastly, here is an interesting notebook company. You subscribe to their Field Notes collection, and receive 10 three-packs, in assorted colors, of their fine notebooks, in graph, ruled or mixed. Lovely and functional! They had me with the graph paper option, but the little color wheel in their logo sealed the deal.

p.s. I am not sure if we always have the same taste in movies (my last favorite before this was Pan’s Labyrinth, I think) but you really should see this one regardless.

The pictures below are from a Wired magazine article on Somali piracy. While the content of the article was compelling and well-researched (it was very similar to the ongoing NPR coverage of the same events) it was the unique layout that really grabbed me. I especially liked the little facts boxes and graphs scattered amongst the illustrations – a great example of print media effectively borrowing design elements from the web world.

This next review is less about a particular article and more about the apparent laziness of a few fashion photographers and magazine editors. All of these ads appeared in the first half (the prime half) of my August issues of Elle and Lucky. I find it incredibly hard to believe that they have run out of creative things to do with fashion models, and all they are left with is to just line them up in front of the camera and say “cheese.”