I haven’t written much here lately, and there are a number of reasons for that which I won’t go into. One of those reasons though, was that I went on a brief holiday to France, land of fashion, food and style. Imagine my horror then, when I chanced upon Comic Sans jewellery.

Mon Dieu!

These made me smile the other day. In my local newsagent, there are some foreign magazines, which have been imported and so need the English price marked on them. Obviously someone in the shop was armed with a biro and asked to mark up all the magazines so customers could see the price. Where is a good clear area on every magazine cover where the customer will definitely notice the information?

Yes, on the forehead of the person featured on the front cover.

Genius. Another design problem solved through a little original thinking.

You know it’s been a bad week at work when even the equipment is trying to tell you something.

Happy Friday everybody.

It’s no secret I’m a fan of Johnson Banks, so I won’t go on about their recent Science Museum identity apart from stating that obviously, I loved it. If you want to see more of it click here.

No, I’m writing this because I noticed something the other morning as I passed an advert in the tube station.

One of the things designers love to do is line things up. Whenever I get a new identity brief, I often size up the name of the company, looking for symmetries, interesting gaps between letters, double entendres etc etc. All very Smile in the Mind. Anyway, I digress. One thing I often do is work out it the letters will stack nicely, so I liked the fact that the new Science Museum logo does that.

4 letters, 6, or best of all, 9 letters are all a gift. Except that there are 13 letters in S C I E N C E M U S E U M, and my OCD gene means I know that’s a prime number, so it doesn’t work. And then I noticed, they’ve run the I and the E together on the first line. Clever buggers.

Normally that wouldn’t work at all, but it works so well I hadn’t even noticed it.

They’ve been redeveloping Blackfriars station forever now. Hopefully the kerning is on their to-do list.

I saw this outside a pub at the weekend. I don’t think it was intended to be taken literally.