Liquid Treat

Want to recreate your grandmother’s flowery tablecloth or put your own spin on a classic Alexander Girard print? Head to Spoonflower, a Web site that allows users to print their own designs on fabric. Launched last year out of an old sock mill in Mebane, North Carolina, the site has rapidly attracted a crafty fan base of 15,000 users. The process is simple: upload a file (JPG, TIF, or PNG), select from multiple placement options, and check out. Prices range from $5.00 for an 8” x 8” swatch to $32.00 per yard of upholstery-weight cotton sateen, and designs are printed (using eco-friendly, non-toxic pigment inks) within five business days. Textile design veterans and amateurs alike can enter the "Fabric of the Week" contest, which is voted on by fellow Spoonflower users. Winning designs are offered for sale as limited-edition fabrics at Spoonflower’s Etsy shop.

Three designers and a racecar driver walk into an airplane hangar... no, that’s not the start of a joke but the beginning of an ambitious project to develop a typeface inspired by the iQ, Toyota’s new “microcar” that seats four and occupies a mere 118 inches. With the help of a seasoned driver, an overhead camera, and the iQ’s incredibly tiny turning radius, designers Pierre Smeets and Damien Aresta collaborated with software developer Zach Lieberman to record and map the iQ as its color-coded wheels traced letters and numbers on the floor of a vast hangar. The result is iQ Agility, a playful typeface that looks inspired by handwritten letters from our sixth-grade French pen pal. The font is now available for free download, but those stateside will have to wait a little longer for the car itself: Currently, the iQ is only available for purchase in Japan and Europe.

You can spot Helvetica a mile away and have an entire theory on why Woody Allen can’t bear to make a film without somehow deploying Windsor Light Condensed, but where do you turn when confronted by a typeface of unknown provenance? Try Identifont, the Web’s largest independent directory of typefaces. Among the site’s multiple ways to filter information from 558 font publishers and 149 vendors is its tool enabling users to answer a series of illustrated multiple-choice questions about the appearance of a particular font (even if a sample is restricted to a handful of letters in a logo or heading). What type of tail is the uppercase “Q” sporting? Is the question mark dotted with a circle, square, or diamond? Click to provide answers and before you can say “ascender serif oblique,” Identifont has winnowed down the set of nearly 7,000 possible fonts to the very one you're seeking to name.

Do you find your cell phone's immutable display typeface blocky and depressing? Try FlipFont, a new application that offers downloadable, mobile phone-optimized fonts to replace the default factory-installed lettering that kills your design mojo a bit more with every SMS message. Developed by Monotype Imaging (home to the Monotype, Linotype, and ITC type foundries), FlipFont offers a growing menu of scalable fonts, from Dennis Pasternak's ITC Stylus (based on freehand architectural lettering) to the robust Musclehead -- or, kick it old-school with Dom Casual or Zapf Chancery. For those inclined to typographical restlessness, the application also includes a utility that allows users to 'flip' to use a different font, or access additional fonts that can be previewed, licensed, and downloaded. To check if the service is available on your phone, point your phone’s browser to http://www.flipfont.mobi, and we’ll catch you on the flipside.

Since its last redesign more than a decade ago, the government-issued “Choking Victim” poster has adorned the walls of New York City restaurants with scenes of a faceless blue duo safely performing the Heimlich maneuver in a Constructivist swirl of step-by-step instructions offering guidance on “how to dislodge food from a choking person.” Brooklyn artist Alex Holden has taken it upon himself to freshen up the ubiquitous poster, softening the didactic graphics and primary colors with a comic strip-style take in a soothing blue and white palette. His reimagined “Choking Victim” poster contains all the same life-saving information, but sets the choking scene at a beachside resort, where members of an upscale crowd (one collapsed, one standing and wearing a fedora) thwart death among the palm trees and festive party lanterns. Holden’s poster has already been adopted by several more aesthetically astute restaurateurs, who presumably find his version of the standard sign easier to swallow

What do you eat when no one is watching? That’s the question asked—and answered—in What We Eat When We Eat Alone (Gibbs Smith), a new book by chef Deborah Madison and her husband, artist and graphic designer Patrick McFarlin. Through stories and recipes that come to life in McFarlin’s whimsical watercolor sketches, readers get a taste of solo dining habits that range from standard (Tater Tots) to semi-bizarre (a leftover spaghetti sandwich) and the wonderfully ridiculous (Life cereal bathed in non-dairy coffee creamer). The book grew out of McFarlin’s habit of querying people whom he met while traveling on what they tended to nibble when no one was looking. “Some were ordinary, some quirky, and others credible and civilized,” he notes of the diverse responses, all of which are united by their ripeness for illustration. Confessed one person McFarlin surveyed, “I pour sardine juice on to cottage cheese while standing on one foot in front of the refrigerator, not putting down the other foot because there’s been a meat leak from the vegetable drawer.”