Howdy folks. I’m writing this post while on a drive back from Houston, Texas—the Dutch oven of our fair state. Don’t worry, I’m not actually doing the driving. I leave that up to Mr. Weenie and Wally the Poodle (whose foot keeps hitting the space bar). As I stare off across picturesque fields of grazing cattle and mattress factories, I’m reminded of a common design practice which dictates that “less is more”—a practice completely disregarded by most advertisers from Katy to La Grange. Let’s face it, everything’s bigger in Texas—trucks, hair, presidential libraries—and typography is no exception. Now, far be it for me to argue with one of the all-time greatest design tips I ever received: “When in doubt, make it big. If still in doubt, make it big and red.” I try to honor this tradition as much as possible, but I think an argument could be made that Texans tend to take this a bit far. Take, for instance, a sign advertising ZDT’s Amusement Park: Correct me if I’m wrong, but if an advertiser has but a few seconds to get his or her message across as I go speeding down the highway at 70mph, wouldn’t it make…

This past weekend my sister and I headed down to San Antonio for a little R&R. We stayed at the Hyatt on the Riverwalk, where we enjoyed lots of Mexican food, shopping and even a foot massage. The highlight of my trip was coming across the following monstrosity. It’s as if spa management handed over window dressing responsibilities to someone’s 16-year-old niece. Poor, poor  Hyatt Spa…

It’s not that Tracking and Kerning have it out for each other; they’re just different breeds of the same species. While kerning refers to the adjustment of space between two specific letters, tracking deals with space between multiple letters in a word, line or paragraph of text. Tracking is the drunk sorority girl of typography, with the paradoxical ability to be either dense or spacey.  It can change the look and legibility of a block of text or create graphic impact for a specific word or headline. Tracking covers a lot of ground and usually won’t vomit on your shoes at the end of the evening. Occasionally tracking is used to squeeze more characters onto a line of type, but I generally recommend against using it for this purpose. While it might prevent a word or two from carrying over to another page or column, it may also cause changes in the flow of text, hyphenation issues, awkward spacing and the dry heaves. Whereas tracking is more popular and easy to do (see “drunk sorority girl”); kerning is like a surgeon, but with more friends and better social skills. A refined and delicate process, kerning is the adjustment of space…

It’s Wednesday again, and you know what that means… WTF? Today’s signs are meant for our safety. I can’t fathom how many lives were saved by such clear messaging.

Check out this sign on an apartment building in my neighborhood. It sucks. It’s not that stacked type is in and of itself a bad thing, but stacking lowercase type is criminal. Don’t do it. The end.