House Blend

“What’s werewolf-proof, lighter than air, and filled with more treasures than a dragon’s lair?” So begins another edition of Veer’s activity book for creatives. The sixth annual edition is the first to be distributed exclusively in PDF form, and it’s worth a download. Forty-two pages worth of puzzles and brain-teasers will test your knowledge of everything from Photoshop filters (match the effect to the image) and typefaces (can you spot Courier in a line-up of serifed impersonators?) to reality TV shows (their titles are presented for your unscrambling) and cowboy terms (hidden in a word search, partner). Those in no mood for games can turn to the back of the book, which offers printable templates for a helper elf, a paper fortune teller, and an origami airplane—the “Miedinger Airvetica”—emblazoned with a certain Swiss font.

What is the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet? What does it signify? The Art Directors Club challenged past winners of its Young Guns competition to answer these questions in the pages of a Moleskine notebook. The creative contest, known as The Undiscovered Letter, was developed to raise awareness of lettera27, a foundation that supports literacy and educational initiatives. The jury winnowed the entries to 27 finalists: inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edgardo Moreno played with out-of-context accent marks while Ivan Pols let nature take its course, sketching melted W’s and wind-ravaged, overgrown A’s. Vincent LaCava chose to personify the twenty-seventh letter, combining U and M to create “the hideous ‘UM’ letter,” the snarling baddie in an alphabet-themed video game of his own creation. “The word ‘um’ is used in the real world when no other word comes to mind,” noted LaCava. “In our game, UM is the illiterate villain, poised against knowledge, education, and progress.”

Missing that fresh Trapper Keeper and need an excuse to load up on new pens? Get in the back-to-school spirit by junking your standard-issue tape dispenser—that clunky black plastic thing—for a wooden one inspired by literature’s most famous whale. The Moby tape dispenser is the latest covetable creation from Jonas Damon, a creative director at Frog Design who has even found a way to improve upon the product design dogma of form following function. His pared-down version, “Form follows,” promotes the idea that “Form is content embodied.” In the case of Damon’s beech wood tape dispenser for Areaware, that content is the squarish face of a whale viewed in profile. Now available for pre-order, it’s sure to get you back in the swim of things.

Few design-minded Web searchers can resist Google's occasional day-long tweaks of its logo to commemorate everything from Thanksgiving and the Olympics to the 25th Anniversary of Tetris and Malaysian Independence Day (August 31, in case you missed it), but that's not the only place to find whimsical "Google Doodles." Marissa Meyer, the company's vice president of search product and user experience, recently Twittered about some new "ASCII art fun": the multi-colored Google logo made up of dashes and slashes. Have a look by Googling "ascii art" and then looking to the left of the search box.

"Plenty of white space and generous line spacing, and don't make the type size too miserly," wrote Giambattista Bodoni in the early 1800s. "Then you will have a product fit for a king." The royalty-ready work of Bodoni ("the king of typographers and the typographer of kings") and hundreds more lettering legends is collected in Type. A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles by Jan Tholenaar, Alston W. Purvis, and Cees De Jong. The first in a two-volume set from Taschen, the book is a lush index of type specimens dating from 1628 to 1900, accented with the borders, ornaments, and graphical flourishes of the day. The evolution of the printed letter is traced through the work of typographers such as William Caslon, John Baskerville, and Claude Garamond, who claimed he could cut printed stamps in "Cicero size" (12 point) at the age of 15. Brush up on your Victorian fonts in preparation for volume two, which will be published early next year.

Never underestimate the power of stickers to change the world. It's the chosen method of Areej Khan, a recent graduate of the MFA design program at the School of Visual Arts. Khan's "We the Women" project aims to get people talking about the issue of women behind the wheel in Saudi Arabia, where only men are allowed to drive. "The point behind it is very simple: we want to get all the opinions around this issue, why people support it, why they are against it or why they cannot be bothered," notes Khan on the project's Web site. "We want to get to the bottom of this social phenomenon." How? By asking Saudi women to share their thoughts about driving in downloadable speech bubble bumper stickers that feature the project logo. It's basically the female icon, but she's wearing the Hagad, which is the ring that men wear over their headdress traditionally," Khan said recently. "So it in itself is a symbol of rebellion."