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Will Avenir live happily after in the strong yet graceful arms of Adobe Garamond Pro? Can Martha Stewart-y Archer ever make it work with Eurostile? See for yourself by playing Type Connection, a fontastic online dating game created by Aura Seltzer, an MFA student in graphic design at the Maryland Institute College of Art. “Type Connection stems from an idea I had that typefaces’ personalities on paper are really very similar to those of people,” Seltzer told Mohawk Fine Papers’ Felt & Wire blog recently. “Typefaces also have certain physiques, voices, and virtues, and in certain designs, they would benefit from companionship.” Choose a single and get ready to mingle by selecting one of four strategies for finding a good match for your bachelor or bachelorette typeface. In addition to honing typeface-pairing skills, players explore typographic terminology and brush up on type history. Meanwhile, you’ll never look at Gil Sans the same way again—the British octogenarian is revealed to be an emotional eater who wears quirky spectacles.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

The internet was suddenly abuzz late last week, just before the weekend, when everyone’s favorite French designer Philippe Starck told a newspaper that he was working with Apple on a revolutionary product that would be out in the next few months. That certainly would be exciting, given that the internet nearly implodes when there’s even a hint of something Apple related in the works, and due to Starck’s long legacy in product design. Unfortunately, Starck also sometimes seems to mangle his words a touch, or exclaim lofty ambitions that maybe aren’t so grounded in reality. Over the weekend, Apple released a statement saying that no, they weren’t working with Starck on anything. Shortly thereafter, the Wall Street Journal reports that the designer laid everything out a bit more clearly, explaining that he’s working with Steve Jobs’ family on building a yacht. All of this, of course, makes much more sense, given that Apple generally keeps their product design very in-house (and certainly away from chatterboxes) and Starck now has something of a history building eco-friendly mega-yachts. We liked these couple of sentences the WSJ put together, summing up this recent there-and-gone story:

This episode has proved two things. Anything said about Apple provokes a huge buzz among the company’s followers. And Mr. Starck, who has waved his minimalist magic wand over everything from a toothbrush to a lemon squeezer to a mineral water bottle to penknives to hotels, likes to talk about himself.

Innovative. Refreshing. Full of ideas. Three ways to describe both TED and Chip Kidd. The charismatic graphic designer, author, editor, Batman expert, and rock star made his TED debut at the recent Full Spectrum conference in Long Beach, California, thanks to “guest curators” Chee Pearlman and David Rockwell, who organized a smashing session entitled “The Design Studio” that featured creative superstars including architect Liz Diller, Metropolitan Museum of Art director Tom Campbell, and IDEO’s David Kelley, bracketed by the whimsy of Maira Kalman‘s tapestry-cum-stage set and the wisdom of John Hodgman, who provided interstitial interrogations on design classics such as Philippe Starck‘s Juicy Salif citrus squeezer (“When you fall asleep it comes alive,” warned Hodgman. “Mr. Starck, I have revealed your terrible secret.”) In the leadoff spot was Kidd, who managed to bring the tech-heavy crowd to its feet by talking about the wonders of books: the analog kind, with dustjackets, odors, and, according to Kidd, “tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness—a little bit of humanity.” Treat yourself to his freshly posted TED talk:

Serkan Ozkaya’s “Radisson/Picasso,” a “manipulated ready-made.”

Serkan Ozkaya has made a chair from 15 sticks of spaghetti, lobbied the Louvre (unsuccessfully) to turn the Mona Lisa on its head for a few days, and created hand-drawn replicas of major newspapers. With the help of a 3D rendering program, the Turkish artist made a supersize golden version of Michelangelo’s David for the Istanbul Biennial in 2005, although the 30-foot-tall statue proved impossible to install and ended up shattering into pieces before the exhibition opened. No such tragedy is likely to befall his pocket-size “Radisson/Picasso” (above), a pair of manipulated matchboxes that is among the lots on offer in Storefront for Art and Architecture’s benefit auction. Also up for online bidding in advance of Thursday evening’s NYC soirée honoring Barbara Kruger and Bernard Tschumi are works by the likes of Louis Kahn, James Welling, Vito Acconci, and Robert Venturi, who with Denise Brown contributed a jazzy sketch of a McDonald’s.

(Photo: Bill Simone)

Never underestimate the power of license plates (as Cosmo Kramer once reminded us). They did the trick for the Society of Design (SOD). When the Lancaster, Pennsylvania-based nonprofit wanted an effective and memorable way to invite letterer, illustrator, designer, and Daily Drop Captain Jessica Hische to be a part of its 2012-13 speaker series, they looked no further than the Department of Transportation. SOD members researched the state’s custom license plate program (eight characters max, including one space), convinced 34 people to change their vehicle registrations, and mapped out a multi-plate message to Hische, a Pennslyvania native who is now based in San Francisco. After filing and re-filing oodles of paperwork over the course of several weeks, they finally had their invitation, in the form of 27 freshly pressed license plates.

The next step was to take the charming analog project to the digital realm. A website was created (invitinghische.com), and called to the attention of Hische via Twitter. “Pennsylvania misses you tremendously,” tweeted SOD to the designer. “Please come home.” Her response was immediate, heartfelt, and, fortunately for those who are now driving around with the plates on their vehicles, in the affirmative. “I am crying at my desk. I’ve never been so touched by a group of people I don’t even know!” Hische tweeted in response. “And the answer of course is YES! I will marry you! I mean come to Pennsylvania.” And she’s bringing presents. Each of the SODers involved with the project will receive a delightful drawing: Hische’s hand-lettered version of his or her name.

“A drawing of a rabbit with the long ears and the cute whiskers and everything else. But when you look at the drawing again the rabbit looks like a hare.

Two lines, where the first line looks longer than the second line. But when you take a ruler to measure them they’re actually the same length. Pretty standard illusion, right? Wrong. Because the ruler you used to measure the lines, it’s now a Snickers bar.

Two hands drawing each other. And the illusion is that at first it seems like a career in the arts is feasible, but they you stare at it for a bit longer and realize that, no, it’s really not.”

-Three of Dan Guterman‘s “New Optical Illusions,” from the Shouts & Murmurs column of the March 5 issue of The New Yorker. Guterman is a staff writer for The Colbert Report.

Despite being one of the most well known artists in the world and selling out at auctions and exhibition and even movie theaters, sometimes the one reward that’s most wanted is the one you can’t seem to ever get. Such is the case with internationally renowned street artist Banksy. Reportedly for the fifth year in a row (we can verify at least back to 2007), the artist has submitted a piece to the Turnip Prize judges, only to see his name left off the shortlist. The prize, for those unfamiliar, is the 12 year old annual art competition in answer to the slightly more high brow Turner Prize. Its listed information on how positive marks are awarded for entries include “lack of effort” and “alliteration or pun used in title,” and with flat out disqualifications handed out for “too much effort” and “it is not sh*t enough.” This year it’s presumed that Banksy entered a frame painting of a stick figure with a though bubble wondering “Is crap art ‘art’ or is it crap?” Unfortunately for the artist, the shortlist has been released and he looks to have been bested by the likes of “a piece of cheese cut into the shape of the letter E” and “a coloured rock called Half a Stone Lighter.” However, perhaps it wasn’t even his attempt at bad art that wound up getting him kicked out in the first place, but rather for one other disqualification listed on their site for pieces that are submitted using a pseudonym.

We hope you had a very nice holiday and a long weekend, and we realize that you’re probably a bit grumpy at being back to the grind, so let’s start off a bit gently with something fun, shall we? Over the weekend, at a fundraiser at his alma mater high school, the actor B.J. Novak, of NBC‘s The Office, confessed to a prank he’d pulled on Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts more than a decade ago. Boston Globe recounts the great story of Novak and his friends deciding to re-record the audio guide given out to guests visiting the museum’s popular 1997 exhibition, “Tales from the Land of Dragons.” To make it more convincing, a friend with a thick Eastern European accent provided the narration, and the pranksters swapped the tapes after legitimately paying for tickets and audio guide rentals. It’s a great, fun story, and something we wish we’d thought of when we were 17. Here’s a bit:

“The first three minutes of the tape were completely accurate … but about 3 minutes in, the tour started getting a little weird. The guy started injecting his personal opinions. He’d say, ’Personally I think this painting is a piece of crap,’” Novak recalled, using a heavy, vaguely Eastern European accent and laughing along with the audience.

“Quietly remove the glass and inhale the rich aroma of the paint,” the faux narrator said. “Ah, that is good stuff!”

If you’re curious, or want this all verified before you believe it, here’s the original article that appeared in the Globe (pdf) in 1997 after the prank tapes were discovered.

If you’re going to get into the licensed sports apparel business, the first rule should probably be that you know a little something about your targeted audience. Not doing so resulted in retailer Victoria’s Secret over the weekend, as its VS Pink Collegiate Collection arm was forced to pull a shirt it had rolled out to Michigan State University (home of the soon to be completed, Zaha Hadid-designed Broad Museum, by the way). Seemingly innocent and general enough, the shirt played off the school’s mascot, reading “Spartans: Hail to the Victors!” which seems rah-rah enough. Only problem is that “Hail to the Victors” is the fight song of MSU’s rivals, the University of Michigan. After being caught by a CNBC reporter who tweeted, “The folks Victoria’s Secret have made a horrible Michigan error,” the shirts were immediately pulled. While some have speculated that it was perhaps a “clever joke” perpetrated by the company, we can’t think of a world in which that makes any sense (why would the Ohio-based company suddenly have it out for MSU?). Instead, it just seems like a design oversight wherein the company wanted to do the least possible due diligence before going to press.

Peter Bristol’s “Cut Chair” (Photo: Peter Bristol)

With Helsinki poised to begin its reign as 2012 World Design Capital, a couple of crafty Finns have issued a challenge to designers worldwide: go a year without designing a chair. Carpenter/artist Eero Yli-Vakkuri and blacksmith/designer Jesse Sipola of Ore.e Refineries are spearheading the No Chair Design Challenge, with goals ranging from freeing up time for non-chair-design-related activities to altering the world’s view of sitting. “We believe that the world already has enough chairs. Designing new ones only takes time away from renovating the ones we already have,” say Sipola and Yli-Vakkuri. “Consider this the ultimate challenge for you to rethink how sustainable design should be manifested.” Show your support by committing not to design a chair in 2012 through their online petition. Beginning in January, the duo will solicit text message-based updates from participants about what they’ve accomplished when not designing chairs, and five designers will be rewarded with “DnS – Design and Craft Diplomas.” Take a seat—or better yet, stand—as you watch this video tutorial on how not to design chairs.