Well, none of my fonts showed up on the Academy Awards show this year unlike last year, but my cousin Eric Simonson did. He and his co-producer Corinne Marrinan snagged an Oscar (Best Documentary Short) for their film “A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin.” Eric was nominated once before for another documentary short, “On Tiptoe: Gentle Steps to Freedom” (2000), and our whole family was excited to hear that he had been nominated again. Only this time he got the statue. Way to go, Eric! (And Corinne! though I don’t know you.)

I confess that I probably wouldn’t know Norman Corwin from Irwin Corey if I hadn’t worked on a package design for a collection of his radio broadcasts back in the nineties. I also confess I don’t know much about Eric’s documentary. All the years I have watched the Oscars, I have always wondered, where the heck can you see these short films? I saw his earlier nominated film at a family reunion. As luck would have it, “The Golden Age of Norman Corwin” will be screened this week at the Plaza Maplewood Theater in nearby Maplewood, Minnesota. I’m planning to go.

Congratulations, Eric!

Reader Dan Madden is a fan of my Pangrammer Helper, a little Flash application I made that helps in the creation of pangrams. (A pangram is a sentence or phrase which contains every letter of the alphabet.) He and his family had so much fun with it that it prompted his brother, an english professor at BYU in Utah, to hold a “Pangram Haiku Contest” with his students. Here are some of the results:

Lost in flight, quiet.

Yellow jacket reproves me.

Vexed, I buzz away.

Mosquito buzzes

around jackal’s furry paw.

So vexing, that bug!

Read ye my haiku!

Strong, living words dazzle. Jump

back, quietly fixed.

Haiku verses flow

like a bad, exacting quiz.

Too jumpy, yet fun.

The ax swerves, tree dies:

Quite a lop job, so crazy.

Man kills for nothing.

Wise raven in tree

Spies sly fox dozing. Gives him

Loud quack. Bejeezus!

Your quick wit doesn’t

Faze me. I can’t help your jive!

Go back to de-tox!

As a long time fan of the books, radio show, TV series, computer game, etc., I am looking forward to April 29 when The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy finally makes it to the medium of motion pictures. It looks to be very different visually from the TV series (not necessarily a bad thing) but true to the spirit of the stories in all their incarnations.

I’m still sad about author Douglas Adams’ death in 2001, but, according to everything I’ve read, the movie is based entirely on the screenplay he was working on when he died. Whatever is different from the earlier works will be either thanks to or the fault of Adams. (Not that there was ever a definitive version of any of the Hitchhiker stories anyway.)

Website here. Towels here. [Update: The links that used to be here are dead.]

In other quirky British franchise news, Aardman Studios is working on a Wallace and Gromit movie to be released next Fall. (Yippee!)

I spent last evening enjoying a talk by Scott McCloud at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He did a similar talk there two years ago which I also attended.

McCloud is a comic book artist and writer best known for his book Understanding Comics. He talked mainly about online comics, a phenomenon he has been involved in since the beginning.

The audience was mainly hard-core comics people, so it felt a little weird for me to be there. When I was young, I read Mad magazine and wanted to be a cartoonist for a while. But I’ve only been into comic books sporadically.

McCloud’s book caught my attention a few years ago and I would put it on my short list of most inspiring and thought-provoking books. The reason is that I just like the way McCloud thinks.

He has a knack for getting beyond conventional thinking, drawing out fundamental principles and presenting them lucidly. It’s an old cliché to say someone “thinks outside the box.” In McCloud’s case, I wonder if he even remembers what the inside of the box looks like.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun. As with the last time I saw him talk, he had his family with him. And, once again, he did a dramatic reading of Monkey Town at the urging of his two young daughters (only this time he didn’t blow out any of the speakers in the auditorium). And I got him to sign my copy of Understanding Comics. Pretty cool.

Meta Swash Alternates

ITC ITC Garamond

Avant Garde Oldstyle

Comic Serif

One Pixel

Cooper Black Monospace

Neue Helvetica Super Ultra Thin

Brush Script Titling

Centaur Frisky

Snell Commoncase

Flash animation designed to promote my typeface Mostra. Move your mouse over it to mix and match the different weights and alternate characters of Mostra in a playful way. You can also think of it as a puzzle: Scramble the letters up and then try to get them back the way they started. If you give up, just reload the page. Created in 2001.

Note: Flash 5 or later plug-in required for animation.