July 14, 2008

Monday Type: Vintage bits, hand jives, & more

• In their Sunday Vintage Type post, i love typography shares more good links than you can eat.  It’s worth a click if only for that first gorgeous Karmann Ghia logotype.
• Hands of Fate:
  • I dig Douglas Wilson’s Vernacular Typography Polaroids–Polaroids taken of mostly hand-painted signs over the past four years all across the United States. [Via]
  • Do great typographers have great handwriting?  Judge for yourself.  [Via]
  • Type seldom looks worse to me than when a faux-handwriting or brush font gives itself away via perfectly repeated characters.  House Industries shows off how automatic character substitution through Open Type addresses the problem. [Via]
• On the Web:
  • Typetester lets you compare multiple typefaces easily.  (This is the sort of thing I’d love to see running in streamlined form as a Flash or AIR panel inside Creative Suite apps.)
  • Ralf Herrmann reviews kerning & Open Type features in Firefox 3 .  (A Web browser supporting ligatures?  I really never thought I’d see it.
• Think type is too easy to steal?  Fight back with a 17.5lb cast iron ampersand. Bam!
• Photoshop type chops:
  • Veerle shows off the use of Smart Filters on text in Photoshop CS3.
  • Create reflective liquid type in Photoshop.