A year or two ago I lettered a logo for a company called Mobile Fidelity — MoFi for short. They do high-end recordings for audiophiles. I got a tip from the designer whom I worked with on the job that MoFi was featured in a recent American Express ad, and that the logo shows up near the end of the ad. Here’s a better look at the logo:

(Thanks to David Collins for the tip.)

In honor of Valentine’s Day, Extensis has posted a silly little game called TYPEmatching wherein you attempt to find romantic match ups between common typefaces.

Logo on a hat box, seen in an antique store in Oneonta, New York, July 7, 2007. Those are some snappy caps.

I haven’t been posting much to Notebook lately because I’ve been, well, busy. The thing I’ve been busy with is this:

Lakeside is a script face I’ve been working on for the past two years. It was initially commissioned by an independent filmmaker for use in some film titles. It’s based on the hand-lettered titles of the classic 1944 film noir classic “Laura.”

An unusual feature of Lakeside is that it has three styles of capital letters suited to different uses:

There are normal caps for, er, normal use; over-sized caps for a fancier appearance; and smaller, plainer caps for all-caps settings—something not normally possible with a script font like this.

Lakeside takes advantage of the OpenType format to put a virtual lettering artist at your fingertips. Here is the font with OpenType Contextual Alternates turned off and then on:

Notice how each letter tailors itself to its position within a word, using a different form depending on whether it comes at the beginning, middle or end. Notice also how the crossbar on the lowercase “t” seems to “know” about adjacent letters and adjusts its width appropriately. (It’s not actually “a little bit too tight,” it’s just that those words are good for showing how the magic works.)

For more information, see the Lakeside Specimen Sheet (496k PDF) and the Lakeside User Guide (1mb PDF).

Licenses for Lakeside can be purchased at Font Bros. Other venues will be added soon.

(Note: Last year I mentioned this font on Notebook when it was still under development. At that time, it was to be called “Launderette.” Unfortunately, that name was taken—twice—so I chose the name “Lakeside” instead.)

Ever notice how the font name “Arial” looks like a certain other word sometimes? (Via DaughterNumberThree)

This week, the radio program Studio 360 is airing a short interview with Gary Hustwit, director of the documentary film Helvetica. You can listen to it online.

If you haven’t seen the film, I highly recommend it. I saw it at TypeCon in Seattle this last August in an auditorium packed with fellow type geeks. Hard to beat that.