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.

Now that we're rounding the bend of campaign season and heading into when things will get really ridiculous, come Super Tuesday (or "Tsunami Tuesday" or whatever they're calling it these days), expect to see a lot more articles like the Boston Globe's "What Font Says Change," wherein they critique the signage of the individual candidates. It happens every election, as the tension builds, the candidates watch their every step, and, frankly, the media outlets need something to talk about (which, sadly, is about the only time design of any kind gets any solid press). In this case, the Globe heads in a fun direction, asking Sam Berlow and Cyrus Highsmith, both of The Font Bureau, to talk about what they think of the typography in the '08 race. And, of course, as we've learned before, Obama always wins flat out:

Obama's type is contemporary, fresh, very polished and professional. The serifs are sharp and pointed; clean pen strokes evoke a well-pressed Armani suit. The ever-present rising sun logo has the feeling of a hot new Internet company. His sans serifs conjure up the clean look of Nike or Sony. This typography is young and cool. Clearly not the old standards of years past.

No! No, no, no, no! What are you crazy? Of course you cannot read Virginia Postrel's article about type in this month's Atlantic online! Are you out of your mind?

But what you can do is watch a video of Michael Bierut (looking adorable, especially during that opening stroll) talkin' type to accompany this mysterious piece about "a revolution in typeface design." And we swear to god, Bierut makes a comparison between photo typesetting and birth control that we're pretty sure is unprintable here. It's no "It's The Real Thing. Period. Coke. Period. Any Questions? Of Course Not." But it'll do.

The article opens (we say it opens but that's so ironic since the opening is really all we have to work with here) by describing the artistry of Bierut's type-only Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design (designed by Abbott Miller):

Yet the book is a graphic extravaganza. Each of the 79 essays is set in a different typeface, ranging in age from Bembo, designed in 1495, to Flama, created in 2006. This profusion of typefaces would have been inconceivable when Bierut, 50, was starting out as a graphic designer. 'I'm not sure in 1982 I could have come up with 79 different text fonts,' he says."

You can also read this interview with Gary Hustwit, which Postrel conducted by phone, so she probably didn't get to see Hustwit throw up in his mouth a little after being asked for the 1,456th time the only question that any interviewer has ever opened with: "Why make a film about a typeface?"

Now. Luckily for you, friends, we are trained in the ways of magic, allowing us to conjure up this top secret no-registration-required link to the story in full. However, like all magic, there's a catch. That link will expire in three days. Use your powers wisely.

As the end of the year draws near, we've been busy cleaning out our "Hmm, Interesting!" folder (would you believe that it's a real folder, tangible and everything?) and stumbled upon a gem from a recent "On Language" column in The New York Times Magazine that took a typographical turn. This column, William Safire's lexical whims take him from the word "shout-out" to "call-out," which he describes as an attention-grabbing "typographical trick that has been sweeping the print media and is now a staple of Web-site home pages." As you, dear reader, are surely aware, these design elements extract a hot phrase, quote, or observation, enlarge it, and toss it into the text blocks of a usually lengthy article (we nominate Vanity Fair for continued excellence in pull-quote/call-out usage). After making sure we're all on the same, well-designed page, he proceeds to chattily Safirize (neologism, ours) the topic into oblivion:

What is this come-on device called in the trade? At The Times Magazine, Bill Ferguson tells me it is called a pull quote. At other newspapers, it is a call-out, but not at The Washington Post: Courtney Crowley, the sports copy chief, says, "Nobody in our department knows what the term 'call-out' means, from the bright-faced young designers to the grizzled veteran editors." I presume they use call-out in its general sense of "challenge to a duel."

Some of us grizzlies prefer the word bank, but that is a synonym for the subhead--lines in smaller type below a headline, adding information to, or diminishing the catchiness of, the head--which is sometimes called a deck, often spelled dek. Although some editors insist that a pull quote must be an actual quotation from a person in the article while a call-out quotes lines from the writer, Time magazine makes no such distinction; the copy chief, Ellin Martens, says her publication uses call-out and pull quote interchangeably to refer "to snippets from the story that are boxed and set in large type."

Well, glad to have cleared that up.