Even the musically illiterate can appreciate the intricate beauty of a physical piece of sheet music—though, to them, the score itself means jack shit. But even the notationally disinclined can now, thanks to the Smithsonian's design blog, know where those pretty little pictures at the beginning of those big long lines come from—otherwise known as the treble clef. Read More >>
Featured comment by Jon D:
"Wow.. I studied music for over 10 years at school and a fair few years after that as a hobby and this never occurred to me. I guess most of what I rea..." More »
Taking the underground can be a nightmare, a confusing, smelly, litter-ridden nightmare. But it's not always that way. Berlin's subway, as it turns out, has some beautiful sights, and you can catch them all in an awesome tumblr devoted to the tubes. Read More >>
Featured comment by alexmoritz:
"The NYC subway runs 24/7, has a very efficient network of local and express trains due to the 'two tracks per direction' layout and you don't have to ..." More »
It's nearly impossible to use Comic Sans on the internet and not get tarred and feathered. It's an internet sin of the highest level. A crime against human decency and people's eyeballs. A parody of a joke of a fool. Universally hated. So... is it possible to defend the font? Is Comic Sans wrongfully reviled? Maybe! Read More >>
If you've ever tried to glance at your computer screen and read something from across the room, you know it's a pretty futile effort, no matter how hard you squint. This demo website has a solution: dynamically changing font size based on your distance from the screen. The catch? It wants to watch you read. Read More >>
Penguin publishing just rereleased five of George Orwell's best works—1984, Animal Farm, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, and Politics and the English Language—as "Great Orwell" editions. Read More >>
Featured comment by strongp:
"Absolutely perfect timing for 1984 as the communications data bill (aka the snoopers charter) still enjoys the support of the Home Secretary (working ..." More »
This gorgeous typographic chess set, based around the Champion font by Hoefler Frere Jones, brings elegant simplicity to the game with each piece assuming the form of its initial. It's almost too pretty to play. Read More >>
Three postdoctoral students at Harvard Medical School—Bryan Wei, Mingjie Dai, and Peng Yin—have found a way to turn individual DNA strands into a fully-loaded font: all the letters of the Roman alphabet, punctuation marks, emoticons, and digits 0-9. Read More >>
Rock and roll unfortunately does not lend well to proper building code, what with all the shaking, rattling and so on. Instead, Type City (2012) by artist Hong Seon Jang constructs a miniature city-scape from blocks of movable type. [David B Smith Gallery via quipsologies via Collossal] Read More >>
Featured comment by d.j.r.burns:
"I had to google moveable type because I was like, some dude made a city scape from a blog? I didn't know it had a 3d engine.... The realised that its ..." More »
Featured comment by Alex Winton:
""Digi Grotesk was derived from other fonts by a German businessman in 1931. As our friends at Buzzfeed explain, the font wasn’t developed for comput..." More »
Someday, hopefully an intrepid computer designer will convert these crazy letters made by Austrian artist Andreas Scheiger into a font. Talk about taking "the living word" to a whole other (grosser) level. Read More >>
First, there was Neil. Then it was Buzz. And then there was Futura, which, unlike Neil and Buzz, stayed behind in Mare Tranquillitatis as part of a plaque commemorating humanity's first landing on the Moon: Read More >>
13 
