Font Fizz

Ever encountered a font that made you wince? (Comic Sans doesn't count.) Try making it through all 26 of Thijs Verbeek's huidletters with your eyes wide open. The Dutch designer created the typeface by pinching human flesh into letterforms with wooden clothespins and then photographing them at close range. It's positively skintillating. If you're interested in something more permanent, pick up a copy of Ina Saltz's Body Type: Intimate Messages Etched in Flesh (Stewart, Tabori, & Chang), a compendium of typographic tattoos. "I do not have any tattoos," says Saltz, a designer and author who recently completed a sequel, Body Type 2. "But if I were to get a typographic tattoo, it would be one which would signal to fellow type-lovers that I am a member of the tribe: an obscure dingbat from a favorite typeface, for example."

Craving a bit of order in a font-frenzied world? Bring out your scientific side with the Periodic Table of Typefaces, which replaces the chemical elements with today's most popular, influential, and notorious typefaces. Created by graphic designer Cam Wilde, the chart organizes 100 typefaces—from Adline (A) to Zapfino (Z)—into families and classes: sans-serif, serif, script, blackletter, glyphic, display, grotesque, realist, didone, garalde, geometric, humanist, slab-serif, and mixed. Typophiles can download and print their own copies of the wildly popular table or order one in the form of a poster, vinyl decal, t-shirt, or Moleskine cover. But beware of overanalyzing the relationship of the fonts with their corresponding elements. Says Wilde, "The fact that Helvetica is number one and matches up with Hydrogen's position is purely a nice coincidence."

Go west, young designer! That's the message of the latest offering from Emigre. The digital type foundry and publisher continues to redefine the concept of a catalog with lushly printed "type specimen booklets" that beckon you to read them cover to cover. The latest one, entitled Historia, looks to the old west by mixing unexpected type combinations with a series of photographs of battlefield sites from the U.S.-Mexican war of 1846-1848 (from the Incident at Gavilán Peak to the Battle of La Mesa). The result is a feast for the eyes, with pages resembling antique bond certificates and California orange crate labels alongside musings on typography, topography, and photography.

With summer approaching, we're freshening up our fonts. Among our favorite recent releases is Raniscript, designed by Stephen Rapp. Think of it as a jaunty French ronde-style cursive by way of The Darjeeling Limited. In fact, Rapp was inspired in part by vintage matchbooks advertising another memorably named Indian train, the Flying Rani Express. What began as a bold take on 19th-century script lettering soon took on a life of its own, notes Rapp of Raniscript. "Having an old world feel, it makes me visualize faded shop signs from India written in English." Ideal for posters and packaging, the full-service font includes old-style figures, fractions, swashes, and ornaments that evoke a stylized subcontinent.

What do you get when you combine Lady Gaga, a love for typography, and abundant facial hair? "Neutra Face," a design-minded music video that is racking up views on YouTube. The project, which hirsute creators Jason Kinney and Mark Searcy describe as "a bearded Poker Face parody" remakes Gaga's hit as an entertaining ode to Neutra, the popular sans-serif typeface. The video is a kind of tribute to a tribute, as House Industries created the Bauhaus-flavored typeface in homage to the midcentury architect Richard Neutra, whose name the company licensed. That detail may have escaped Kinney and Searcy. "'Neutra' is actually pronounced 'NOY-trah,'" they note on their YouTube page. "But that escaped our knowledge in the fits of fun we were having doing this project. Word."

Forget handwriting fonts. The next generation of tailored typefaces will be based on...well, faces. Designer and technology whiz Mary Huang is pioneering the concept of a typographic photobooth with Typeface, custom software that translates facial dimensions into generative type design. Still a work in progress, the program draws letters based on the unique curves, angles, and proportions of a person's face. "Technology gives us opportunities to make type design more spontaneous and personal," says Huang, who is busy completing a downloadable version of her software. "Hopefully, I'll get this done quickly. Need to stop obsessing over how the letters are drawn for a bit."