This cor­ner store’s sign­painter clearly didn’t have any num­bers on hand, and cut cor­ners (so to speak) by draw­ing the 9 as a reversed P. But P and 9 are not nor­mally exact mir­ror images of each other, so we end up with a 9 with a hard 90° angle where the cir­cle joins the stem. As a result, I can’t read it as any­thing but a P, no mat­ter how hard I try.

The Onion suc­cess­fully raised the typo­graphic aware­ness of pop cul­ture by one point this week upon print­ing this head­line: “Wrong Font Chosen For Gravestone”

This raises so many great ques­tions, such as:

• How are head­stones designed, anyway?
• What does this say about our expec­ta­tions of what kinds of let­ter­forms are appro­pri­ate in the con­text of a cemetery?
• How can we best select let­ter­forms to rep­re­sent our­selves into eternity?

Hand-painted sig­nage has been scarred and obscured by fire on this wall in Berkeley. It’s no longer as leg­i­ble as it once was, but what great texture!

Decades of weather have worn away this beau­ti­fully hand-carved let­ter­ing, erod­ing the thinnest points of each let­ter. (Note the con­nec­tions between lines on the “E” and “A.”)

Thanks to their low-budget, inde­pen­dent nature, dry clean­ers and laun­dro­mats often employ unique let­ter­ing done by hand. Kitty’s Cleaners, though, went the extra mile by paint­ing a four-foot tall feline, indi­cat­ing that the operation’s name­sake is a large, white cat.