Actually, I don’t hate Comic Sans at all. It reminds me of the “David’s Lemonade” annual report from back in the 70s. Use Comic Sans well and the Typemaniac will love you. Use it poorly and you will be mocked.
Vincent Connare, Inventor Of ‘The Most Hated Font,’ Defends Himself.
Larry Yudelson turned us on to Stately, a cool map font. With stately, you can make a map of the US or any part of the US and control each state with plain CSS. Nice. Each state in Stately is a separate glyph (e.g., Alabama is “A”), all the glyphs overprint each other, and share the same bounding box. Which is an elegant solution to the problem of positioning the states. It just means that you cannot hyperlink the states or use hover effects.
Stately is a fine solution for infographics, particularly those that need to be updated frequently or by a script. But not for interactive web maps.
Gosh, I love this one. Won’t someone please give me an assignment where I can use it?
Thanks to our buddy Bill for telling us about Ben Barrett-Forrest’s wonderful “History of Typography,” done entirely in paper animation. 
via The History of Typography in Paper-Letter Animation – Little Green Footballs.
Massimo Vignelli’s redesign of the signage of New York City Transit Authority in 1970 was a major example of the International Style or Swiss Style of graphic design. The graphics standards manual was credited to Unimark (Massimo Vignelli was one of its the founders and partners), and is now available online (click on Original Manual) thanks to the efforts of Niko Skourtis, Jesse Reed, and Hamish Smyth. The copy they have posted once belonged to the famous Pentagram graphic design collective.
New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual, 1970
See the manual. Thanks to the HuffPost for the link.
I have no problem with the Vignelli design (though there have been attempts to improve on it). My main complaint is that, 40 years later, the implementation of the system’s signage is so incomplete and inconsistent, that visitors frequently get lost below ground.
See Paul Shaw’s article about transit signage and NYC’s in particular.
I was doing some educational research on the Web, when I ran across a cool, swashy script being used on a magazine cover. I didn’t recognize it, so I asked over at WhatTheFont. One of the mavens there identified it as Scriptina Pro. Apparently designed and distributed for free by Fredrick “Apostrophe” Nader, it’s been cleaned up and extended by CheapProFonts. You can get for free from MyFonts.com. As you can see, it’s gorgeous.
Scriptina Pro sample
YouWorkForThem was selling the 21-font Trend family for $19, so I figured what the heck and bought it. Don’t know when I’ll use it but it’s hard to resist a bargain.
House Industries has released several fonts by Ed Benguiat that I hadn’t seen before. Best of all you can try them out!
Somewhere back in the 1970’s, Letraset issued Dean Morris’ Quicksilver typeface as dry transfer lettering. Now Dean collects pictures of his funky face in use. See his Quicksilver Font Museum.
