Fontish self indulgence

I know that I sometimes veer a bit too far into the realm of geekdom for the tastes of some, but I hope you'll bear with me today, as I share a couple links.

Scratch, Chicken. Scratch.

Sometime between when the nuns gave me poor marks on my report card for holding my pencil “wrong” and my twenty-something years, I developed an artish passion for handwriting and calligraphy. The most significant result of this was the not-infrequent comment from others that my handwriting looked like a girl's – their way of saying that my script was, at the same time, pretty and legible. Later, I took an interest in the study of graphology and became reasonably adept at it (but that's another story).

Over the years, the advent of e-mail and an increase in the amount of time I spend keying computer code have taken a toll on my handwriting. While still arguably feminine-looking, my script now appears less like that of a sophisticated Jane Austen type and more like that of a psychotic ex-girlfriend who provides the inspiration to pack everything in the car and just skip town in the middle of the night.

It seems the folks at Smashing Magazine share my nostalgia for the bygone days of handwritten correspondence. Check it out.

Got Grunge?

At the other end of the spectrum are those fonts that have been created to intentionally create the impression of crud and untidyness. You see them everywere, from the handbills advertising bands at the local rock clubs to the titles for televised sporting events.

While I was at the Smashing Magazine site, I just had to check out the link for one of their earlier postings, “63 Must Have Grunge Fonts”.

I can tell the available hard drive space on my home computer will be decreased by several megs, because there are more than a few of these I'll have to have.