Graphic Design

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.

Welcome to this week’s edition of “WTF Wednesday,” where we dissect and discuss the higher art of signage design. Sometimes a hand-drawn message is the best option for temporary signage. In this case, the designer has elegantly captured the drama of the moment: It takes great skill to create beautiful bilingual signage. The challenge is…

Welcome to another edition of “WTF Wednesday.” Today’s examples show us how to clearly define an audience. Our first sign appeals to bargain shoppers trying to form a basketball team for the year 2029: The next two signs are aimed at hikers: Well, that’s all for this week’s “WTF Wednesday.” Feel free to submit your…

The year is 1987, and the giant-haired version of myself is a sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin. Disillusioned and uninspired as only a 20 year old can be, I find myself hiking across campus to that bastion of black jeans and unfiltered cigarettes, The Art Department. I have found my people. More…

Welcome to this week’s edition of WTF Wednesday. Today’s first submission comes from everybody’s current or soon-to-be favorite fitness trainer, Christine Tusa, with Tusa Fitness. Welcome to the classy side of the river: Here we have a few signs that are welcome, if entirely unexpected:

This week’s WTF Wednesday submission comes from photographer David Ingram, who took this lovely photo of me in front of Mr. Weenie’s artwork a few weeks ago. He also took the first two photos you see below. Here we have signage that’s goal isn’t to be beautiful, but rather to inform. It is exactly halfway…

Hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of Tuesday’s Type Tip. Today we delve into the seedy side of typography with the letter “X.” The “x-height” of a typeface is the distance from baseline to meanline. The meanline runs across the tops of the main bodies of lowercase letters, excluding ascenders & descenders. This critical…

I’m not going to waste a keystroke on discussing how f*cked up this sign is. Instead, I will show you 3 signs that are better than this one. ~ Now, go grab a camera and send me your favorite WTF examples. They might be featured in an upcoming edition of WTF Wednesday!

I have a confession to make: I’m in love with letters. Not in the cool, romantic way literature buffs and poets love letters; but in the dorky, glasses sliding down the nose, masking tape stuck to chin, graphic designer’s way. And I’m on a mission to share that love with you. Initially I had grand…