A bit of cooking, a bit of typography. Next meal will likely have a more elaborately written and designed menu, but this was just a bit of fun.

I was, however, playing with a new approach to faux letterpress shading that I’m fairly pleased with. It’s delicate, but decidedly letterpress in appearance. The coverage noise is a little pronounced, but it’s digital, and we usually need to exaggerate these things.

Blambot has a fantastic breakdown of how type conventions work in comics and graphic novels. Full of things that are news to me, like the use of breath marks. Great as a supplement to the always relevant work of Scott McCloud and Will Eisner.

Comics Grammar & Tradition (via BoingBoing)

Earlier this month, the fantastic Mark Simonson put together a lengthy post about the typography present on screen in the AMC show Mad Men. He mostly limits his exposé to showing which fonts are or are not of the period. But he also points out that real props used from the period in the show all have an anachronistic patina to them, as if the Selectrics available in the 60s were already 40 years old!

While this might seem nit-picky, no one can doubt the fantastic job the Mad Men production designers are doing on the show. We can thank Mark, though, for keeping period typography honest.

Mad Men, Mad Props

Xeni Jardin and the kind folks at BBtv allowed me to contribute some title cards to their fantastic parody, SPAMasterpiece Theater.

I’ll post some more about this later in the week, including what I’m sure will be an overly pedantic analysis of the style and design choices. Now doesn’t that sound like fun?

UPDATE: Ugh, I now see that my WP template isn’t wide enough (at 430) for BBtv’s embeded video (480). I’ve scaled it down to 430 in the embed, but there are some resolution scaling problems with that. Hit FULL SCREEN for the good on the goods. I guess my template needs some fine tuning… and coarse tuning.

John Hodgman in BBtv’s SPAMasterpiece Theater, Vol III: THE STOMATOLOGIST