Great gift idea for the gambling designer in your life: this deck of cards does away with the traditional suits and replaces them with the standard four printers’ inks — cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

Photographer Thierry Cohen creates these fantastical images of urban cities made to look dark, combined with rich night skies borrowed from other, less light-polluted locations. The results suggest what New York City, say, would look like.

There is a slideshow of his work at NYTimes.com, and more information at ThierryCohen.com.

I’m actually a big fan of Courier, so I’m intrigued by this project from screenwriter John August, who regards the ubiquitous typeface as a key tool of his trade. August writes:

“In July 2012, I asked type designer Alan Dague-Greene to come up with a new typeface that matched the metrics of Courier — thus protecting line breaks and page counts — while addressing some of its weak spots… Alan rose to the challenge, creating a typeface that is unmistakably Courier, but subtly improved in ways you wouldn’t necessarily notice at first.”

Courier Prime is available now for free. Read more and download it at JohnAugust.com.

Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch died this morning at 88. It’s a sad moment because he was the first New York City mayor that I was aware of as a kid. The mayors who came before seem like names from a history book, whereas the name “Koch” will always sound contemporary for me.

Over at Slate, there is a smart article about how Hizzoner’s legacy was intimately tied with the emergence of hip-hop.

“Koch presided over New York City from 1977 to 1989, almost exactly the years during which hip-hop went from a small scene of Bronx block parties to a global cultural phenomenon. During those years, the history of hip-hop is the history of Ed Koch’s New York: Until the last couple years of his reign, nearly every major hip-hop artist rose out of one of the five boroughs or Long Island.”

Definitely worth a read for children of the Eighties.