Business Typography

Some interesting “business” typography has been landing in my inbox lately. The viagra/cialis spammers' ever evolving efforts to get past spam filters has lead to these gridded type treatments. Above, the letterforms are straightforward, and, to humans, the words are readable. However, to a spam filter searching for keywords, this just says VGCCLIRHAiiAAEPAS. Below, color blocks are used to create the letterforms, which to a spam filter aren't letters at all.

Fortunately, my spam filter learns quickly, so these messages are now routed directly to my spam folder. Though I kind of like the bitmap typeface below.

Update: I just found another one in my spam folder. A geometric “cialis” cobbled together with the “cheap” from above. Not much thought given to the aesthetics of type here!

The Typography of the Corner Tavern

When considering local flavor typography, my mind immediately turned to that Baltimore fixture, the corner tavern. I took a walk around the block to see what I could see, typography-wise.




At the north end of my block is Salt. Salt is a contemporary take on the corner tavern, featuring new American cuisine. This contemporary outlook is reflected in the design of the whole tavern, including the signage. The lowercase sans-serif letters are mounted slightly off the face of the wall, using light and shadow to created added dimensionality; A horizontal line in the brickwork provides a convenient baseline.




At the south end of my block is Butts & Betty's Tavern. This sign hangs over the corner entrance to the tavern. The typography seems haphazard, pairing a slab-serif with an italic sans-serif. It's a straightforward sign without a lot of thought given to aesthetics.




Across the street from Butts & Betty's is Brewster's Tavern. This tavern changed hands not too long ago, and this is a fairly new sign. The swash on the B echoes the curved form of the rooster's tail. The coloring-in of some of the counters adds a whimsical quality to the letterforms.





Finally, one block west of Butt's & Betty's and Brewster's is Mary's Tavern. This is a very small neighborhood tavern, run out of the front parlor of a private home. The sign appears to be homemade using plastic letters from a hardware store. It's purpose would seem to be purely functional, perhaps to meet legal requirements for signage for a place of business.

Typography Artist Talk

Local typography rock stars, Bruce Willen and Nolen Strals of Post Typography, will be giving an artist talk at UMBC on Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 7:00pm. They will be discussing their work as featured in the UMBC exhibition The Art of Persuasion: Poster Design from 1896 through 2008, and also signing their new book, Lettering & Type: Creating Letters and Designing Typefaces.

Hand-Painted Typography

The Baltimore Farmers Market is a fantastic place to see hand-drawn and -painted typography. Everything from professionally painted trucks to magic marker on cardboard. Farmers market regulars may have noticed this hand-painted lemonade sign at the Best Fish on Planet Earth booth. If you ever find yourself waiting in line for coffee at Zeke's it'll be right behind you. I love that the sign itself is lemon-shaped, and also that it's clearly seen better days. Here are a few other great examples.

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This Falafel booth sign is a great way to make a large sign out of small materials. Easy to pack up and transport.



Even on simple price signs there is often interesting hand-lettering.



The type's not so interesting here, but the pumpkins are cute.



I can't have a Baltimore Farmers Market post without including the crab truck.

Baseline CSS

Calling all fans of Swiss Graphic Design and typographic standards (that would be me)! Baseline CSS Framework is a free CSS framework that makes it easy to develop websites using a “real” baseline grid.



Baseline began as a way to quickly prototype a website and developed into a full typographic framework. It is a side project of Stéphane Curzi of projeturbain.

Baseline CSS is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Welcome to my typography hunt

In this blog I'll be focusing on typography in the wild. My purpose here is to engage with type in the world around me. I expect to find the good, the bad, and the ugly, along with the innovative, the trite and the mundane. I'll post my findings and see what, if any, themes develop.

Of course, part of exploring the type around me will include finding resources on the web, and I'll be posting those as well.

Wish me luck, and stop by often to see how my hunt is going.