I’ve nabbed some of his work from The Superest to illustrate the point — I put them on a cards for my own amusement, as the site reminds me of Top Trumps (and because I think you need to visit the site to see the full ones). Go and visit this, and his main site.

These are from the first set. The ampersand on Confessions of a Sinner is quite special, the Meditations cover looks like it uses every ligature in Jupiter, and The Inner Life cover is just lovely — I’d like it as a large print.

English may not be Chinese, but when using monospace type, and with the right subject, you can get away with columnar type. There are some very nice typographic designs in the second set.

I have a couple of other favourites from the third set too, but these three are great.

Struggling to understand what could possibly be good about Comic Sans, Valerio — together with partners Hugo Timm, Filip Tydén and Erwan Lhussier — found that the doggedly goofy font’s irregular forms made it one of the easiest typefaces for dyslexics to read.

Now, this is to many intents and purposes, quite true. However, it is also true of almost every other sans-serif face out there; Avenir, Helvetica, MS Sans Serif, Verdana, Arial, and so on. There is nothing unique or special about Comic Sans that makes it particularly good for dyslexics, except in the case of “you read best what you know best” — a dyslexic used to Comic Sans may well find it easier to read, but others may not. The trick is to find a happy medium; something that works best for most people (i.e. your audience of, say, dyslexics) and reasonably well for the rest; something that does no harm*. I have done a lot of work designing UIs with accessibility as a primary requirement, and in one of the largest projects an ‘expert’ demanded that the interface and all instructional graphics be set in Comic Sans. Later, after consultation with real experts at the Royal National Institute for the Blind, we ended up with the following advice, summed up in this rather pithy quote from the RNIB website:

Avoid highly stylised typefaces, such as those with ornamental, decorative or handwriting styles.

The RNIB consultant basically recommended Arial: it is commonly available, people are well used to it, and is an unornamented and regular sans-serif with clear letterforms. It also has a clear advantage of not being incredibly insulting to adults who were using the learning programme, and believe me, they did find it insulting. I’d know — I was there.

Oh, and as for Serious Sans, well, there’s not much to say. It’s not very good, but I don’t think it’s really meant to be. If you’d like to see the results of a genuine and serious project to produce a legible and accessible face, have a look here.

I have ranted on this subject before.

* Of course, if accessibility is a serious issue, you need to allow the user to specify the display type, if you can.

Having said all that, I’m still going to trace some of these (because quite frankly I won’t be able to resist), so here are a few of my favourites.

Anyway. I’ve had these two images knocking around in a couple of my hundreds of open tabs — I like maps so they appeal to me.

To create a font based on this would be quite a project as the original lettering was clearly done by hand, though I’m sure with a deft application of Opentype rules you could create something that has much of the rhythm and charm of the original. However, I think I’ll create a stock of basic letterforms and apply variants and tweaks as I need them — I doubt I’ll be setting much body type in this. The lettering doesn’t look like it would suit a standard set of uppercase glyphs, but having ornamental lowercase forms in their place would work rather well — the swashed 9 shows what direction to take.

As usual, I’ve had to trace some of them with trusty beziers — I’ve just finished doing this one. I love the PK monogram and the composition of the two styles. Fun to trace too.

Update: I have been reliably informed that as the exhibition was about medals and military insignia, the PK monogram is designed to resemble military insignia. Thank you David and Yves! Hmm. Military insignia, huh? Something to research…