I just came across “The Ladies Tea” on Swissmiss just now. Like her, I smiled at the logo, which is rather lovely, but couldn’t help but notice the awful kerning on the type. Below I’ve got the original on the left, and a version where I simply retyped the name in Arno Pro on the right. My modified version isn’t perfect, but at least the D-I-E combo isn’t quite so munged.

Yes, I know there’s a missing apostrophe, but putting it in doesn’t help the logo one bit.

Caught my eye: An inspirational bit of lettering for (and by) AAD.

This image has been knocking around the hard-drives of my last four computers since I scanned it in. I’ve always admired the typography of it since I found it on the pub table all those years ago. The joys of being type-obsessed, eh?

I always thought that the names of the shuttles was written in Helvetica, at the very least screened on in some regular manner. Looking at this image from airliners.net, I see that it looks hand-painted, and after all these years of patching and repainting, the lettering looks decidedly wonky.

An old one, but recently discovered by me on my travels. The Lorem Ipsum Cuff, on Veer.

Of course, I have to include a chunk of Lorem Ipsum on a post such as this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Curabitur pretium. Vivamus nisi. Maecenas eget mauris eu mi lacinia molestie. Sed a dui. Nulla sem ante, iaculis at, volutpat eu, facilisis in, metus. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Aliquam erat volutpat.

I came across this nice little maze generator the other day. I’ve had a little play with it, and it’s incredibly relaxing to watch it solving the maze for you. I used to spend hours and hours drawing mazes as a youngster (detail at right), pages and pages of them. Whole notebooks full. I think mine has a certain organic charm, though I do love the cartesian regularity of the generated ones.

Tufte discusses this a fair bit in his book Visual Explanations, but I thought I’d raise it for a site I’ve just come across; style.com. I’d seen a thumbnail of one of the images from this ‘feature’ on pearls, and clicked to have a closer look. Unfortunately, it turns out that the ‘thumbnail’ was the actual posted size. Look at the area of the screen devoted to stuff that isn’t the article you’re interested in. I’ve coloured the areas below. The grey area is the useless area, the black area supporting text for the useful area, and the white area is the focus of the article, the most useful area. Look how small it is. Style.com is clearly a site utterly devoted to selling ads. They’re perfectly entitled to, mind, but I won’t be visiting them again.