Fonts

I wish I had one iota of design sense.

The independent, feature-length documentary Helvetica tells the story of this ubiquitous modern font while also providing a sense of the evolution that's occurred in typeface, from the messy, silly busyness of design of the 50s, to the modern period characterized by Helvetica everywhere, to the post-modern period of illustrated fonts, and back to a rebirth of Helvetica. Fascinating if you're into that sort of thing.

Here are a couple other fun font items:

• A story in the August 12, 2007 New York Times Magazine describes the design of Clearview, the font of road signs.
• Fontshop is a font site with free tools for creating fonts. Since I'm incapable of designing fonts, I just enjoy looking at the gallery to marvel at what creative people can do.