You've seen the grand prize winners of the inaugural UnBeige Name Game (in which we challenged you to name a dog, a band, and a child after commercially available typefaces), but we also wanted to share with you the outstanding entries that we've deemed worthy of honorable mentions in each of the three categories.

"I always wanted to name a dog Barcelona," wrote Jennifer Uner, who plans events for GOOD. "Yell it across the room for full effect." (Or sing it like Freddie Mercury.) Graphic designer Craig Patterson picked Poor Richard, a perfect fit for this sad-eyed black lab or any canine with a taste for almanacs.

Typeface names seem to lend themselves to musical monikers, making it particularly difficult to choose our winners, but we couldn't resist Alicia Feliz's creative combination of Mister Chuckles (the jubilant, Deco-flavored typeface by Nick Curtis) and Zipper into what sounds like a promising Ska act: Mister Chuckles and the Zippers. Craig Bower, creative director at Ignite Digital, kept it short and sweet with his idea for a band called Swister, after the typeface designed by Chank Diesel and Alison Olmack.

In selecting the honorable mentions for typeface-inspired children's names, our unabashed Francophilia won the day. Ami Dalal nominated the jaunty Garamouche, Garamond's drunken cousin, while Joe Greco suggested naming the little one Anisette, the licorice-flavored typeface that tweaks the Art Deco capitals in A.M. Cassandre's posters. "Before our first child was born, my wife and I would go back and forth on names," wrote Greco, the corporate design director at GateHouse Media. "She bought two books that had a total of some 70,000 names with the hope that somewhere within those pages was the name of our first born...and second born. We decided on Dylan and Matthew, but who would have thought that to find a cool baby name, all we had to do was open a font book?"

Finally, winning major points for parsimony was Danu Widatama, who picked the multifunctional Georgia for naming a dog, band, and child. Explained Widatama, "It's simple and stylish."

Previously on UnBeige:

Continuing with our typography theme on this fall Friday, we thought we'd call your attention to the below video gem from our friends at I Love Typography, who helped to make our UnBeige Name Game a smashing success. It's a clever promotion for the font manager Suitcase Fusion 2 in the form of a trailer for Bravefont, which stars some characters [rim shot] that we're sure you'll recognize. And it's so nice to see Dom Casual working again.

As if we needed another reason to adore comedian Ricky Gervais, the co-creator of the original UK version of The Office and possible host of next year's Oscars, a profile in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly (but not available online) reveals his appreciation for the power of design. In a sidebar focused on "Five splashy projects that Ricky Gervais says he turned down," the ur-David Brent explains his rationale for passing on the starring role in a remake of Arthur, the 1981 starring Dudley Moore as "the most quotable drunk millionaire that is likely to ever steal your heart."

"I said no straightaway," says Gervais. "Why would I mess with a perfect comedy? They know people don't watch films that have the wrong font—it's got an '80s font."

Sure, there were the 15,000 performers, including 2,008 drummers in "Fou Formation," glowing fairies, and adorable children singing at that pitch that renders any song both eerie and heartbreaking. There was the gigantic glowing globe that took a year to design and construct and was a dead ringer for the AT&T logo. There were miles of LEDs, constant pyrotechnical flourishes, and a performance of movable type printing that would have given Gutenberg a heart attack, all set against a spirited battle of Claritin vs. Zyrtec that raged during commercial breaks. But amidst all of the excitement of last Friday's Olympic opening ceremony, we zeroed in on the sole appearance of English text as it flashed on the massive screen that welcomed the world to Beijing.

The fateful moment came during the post-countdown part of the ceremony, when the Confucius-inspired welcome greeting appeared first in Chinese, then in English, and then in both languages. What typeface made the cut? Futura Bold Italic, of course. We struggled to find a decent video of the scene, but the below amateur one will give you a flavor. Look sharp around 3:25, right before they cut away to a shot of Barbara Kruger grinning. (OK, maybe we imagined that last part. Pass the Claritin.)

Our friends at frog design have unveiled a new website for their boundary-pushing publication, design mind, along with a new print edition of the magazine. The latest issue (the eighth so far) is entitled "numbers," and so revolves loosely around digits. Especially noteworthy is this issue is Chelsea Holden Baker's chat with designer Erik Spiekermann (pictured at left), who discusses the three-dimensional typographic challenge he took on when commissioned to create sets of house numbers for Design within Reach. While numbers are tough, Spiekerman says that he can't bear to delegate their design to others. "They're just too pretty."

But most people do not design numbers because numbers are hard. As you can see on the street, most numbers are standardized. They tend to be very generic because people are scared of numbers; redesigning numbers is like redesigning the Latin alphabet. The way we write our numbers comes from Arabic, although they've been abstracted. The three used to slant down, like a 2 or something. You see this angle in Arabic, with the stresses on the bottom. Our normal numbers—real, legible numbers—are a little bit clunky, because they're tall but narrow. They have weird diagonals. It's a nightmare.

Peter Wayner has picked up on the trend of the world seemingly now needing a constant stream of new type in his piece "Down with Helvetica: Design Your Own Font." It's about the desire to move away from the fonts everyone has access to and hiring out to create a unique design for each project. In the piece, they get into conversations with a number of different designers like Charles Andermack and about companies like FontStruct, as well as talking to these client people who are now thinking along these lines and are providing the bread and butter for the aforementioned designers and companies. Here's a bit how Andermack (or Chank Diesel as you may know him) offers an inexpensive custom handwriting font service to people and then turns it around to sell as something new:

Mr. Andermack asks clients to copy a collection of words in their handwriting, then scans the letters into his computer and produces a font. The only catch is that Mr. Andermack keeps the rights to resell the font to others. He publishes a collection of distinctive handwriting fonts to ad directors who want to capture a particular style or era. Your handwriting could end up in the next bundle. Exclusive rights cost more.

Minnesotans in winter are a resourceful (if shivering) bunch, and type designer Chank Diesel is no exception. In February, the founder of Minneapolis-based type house Chank Company recruited groups of Minnesota State University graphic design students for an outdoor type design workshop -- on a Sunday in Mankato when the temperature dipped as low as -5°F, give or take the occasional 20 mph windburst. "I figured since they were crazy enough to choose to live in Mankato in February in the first place, they'd be cool with going out in the subzero cold to draw fonts on the sidewalk," Diesel tells us. "I was right. They were fearless and we had a lot of fun." Chank recorded the fun and fearlessness in the below video.

"I was ready to go out in the parking lot scratching the alphabets on windshields," says Diesel. "But luckily we got a fresh coating of snow that morning to make the sidewalks the perfect canvas." On that canvas, Chank and the students created NoMak, which he describes as "a hand-tooled, calligraphic grunge logofont from the future." Transforming the collection of arcs and straight lines into a geometric sans-serif typeface was no walk in the snow, however, and Diesel is now working on a cleaner, all-geometric version. For now, there's NoMak, available as a free download on the Chank website. Says Diesel, "It's what I imagine to be the last-gasp, death-scrawl, of the last robot on earth trapped in an ice cave in Antarctica in the distant future. Just before his battery runs out."

We stumbledupon.com this web site, started by expert calligrapher, Michael Sull, who has mastered the nearly lost art of Spencerian script, which was developed after 1840, flourished throughout the U.S. almost to the turn of the 20th century, and then virtually disappeared, replaced by the Palmer Method. There's been a renewed interest in this particular type of calligraphy, mainly for its Victorian flair and romantic look. If you're so inclined, Sull offers special workshops on the topic in the fall.

A little while back, we linked up a bonus clip from Helvetica that Gary Hustwit had put up on the film's blog, featuring Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones talking about Gotham, the famous font they created that is now being used by Obama for his campaign. Our friends over at Design Observer caught a nice follow-up to that post with a recent entry over on Hoefler and Frere-Jones' own site, talking directly about what they think of the current campaign type. It's brief, but, as to be expected, it's pretty interesting. Here's a bit:

A journalist recently asked what it is about Gotham that we think suits the Obama campaign. We'll defer to designers John Slabyk and Scott Thomas to make that call -- they selected the font for Obama for America, we merely provided it -- but one thing we can say as type designers is that Gotham isn't pretending to be anything it's not, which makes it an unusual and refreshing choice for a campaign.

Because this writer can't get enough Obama and will shamelessly use this blog to shameless share his politics, we turn to Mr. "I Made Typography Cool Again" Gary Hustwit and his most recent post, "A Font We Can Believe In." In it, he shares a bit about Obama using Gotham as his default "change" font and then goes on to share a bonus clip from his film Helvetica, left out of the original but available on the new DVD, talking to Hoefler and Frere-Jones about how they created Gotham, originally for GQ magazine. Here's a bit:

Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones spoke about the creation of Gotham during our interview for Helvetica, and looking back at their description of what GQ wanted from the font, it sounds surprisingly Obama-esque. "GQ had a dual agenda of wanting something that would look very fresh, yet very established, to have a credible voice to it," says Hoefler. It also needed to look very masculine and "of-the-moment." Mission accomplished.