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.