Intended for study by comic book letterers, this is a catalog of the unique grammatical and aesthetic traditions inherent in the unique visual language of comics. Helpfully annotated with such advice as “A [balloon] tail should terminate at roughly 50-60% of the distance between the balloon and the character’s head,” and “There’s almost no plain bold in comics dialogue.”

A primer on the cross-platform type forГmat’s expert layГout feaГtures, richer linГguisГtic supГport and advanced typoГgraphic conГtrol. “Using OpenType techГnolГogy you can subГstiГtute your charГacГters for difГferГent glyphs using many difГferГent methГods; ligatures, small Caps, oldstyle figures, fractions, superscript/subscript, ordinals, alternates, titling characters and many more.”

A one-day symposium from The School of Visual Arts MFA Design Criticism (“D-Crit”) Department, organized by its first class of graduating students. “Moderated by D-Crit faculty member, award-winning author and ‘Studio 360’ host Kurt Andersen, this inaugural event will feature thesis presentations by all fifteen graduating students alongside professional critics and thinkers including design visionary and Doors of Perception founder John Thackara and author and educator Peter Hall.” At the SVA Theatre in New York City all day Friday, April 30, and free, to boot. R.S.V.P. here.

Patric King, from House of Pretty, reviews the newly announced upgrade to Adobe’s anchor suite.

“On one level, I like a lot of the new features, and they will actually save me time in the day-to-day workflow. On the other hand, I am still frustrated by its lack of consistency between interfaces, despite that being the primary point of CS4.”

I’m afraid this will always be the case with these major releases from Adobe; Creative Suite just can’t seem to shake its major inconsistencies, no matter how the company tries and no matter how much we wish it would succeed. Read the full review here.

A mildly interesting side note: a Twitter query that I posted today unscientifically confirms the generally held suspicion that many designers have adopted an ‘every other release’ approach to Adobe Creative Suite. Most respondents are considering an upgrade from CS3 (which is what I’m using myself right now), having skipped over CS4.

Over at Kickstarter, Craig Mod and Ashley Rawlings are taking pledges in their quest to reprint their beautiful hardcover guide to Tokyo’s art galleries, which I praised two years ago on this blog. The original run sold out, so this is your chance to own a copy of this exquisite tome, as well as to finance a free iPad version. They have until 1 May to raise a little over US$2,000 in order to make this happen. Make your contribution here.

Type guru Stephen Coles presents a surprisingly extensive case against Apple’s putative attention to typographic high standards across its various products, with special focus on the iPad’s disappointments in this realm.

“A device designed for media consumption could validate Apple’s dedication to design by emphasizing design’s most basic element: typography. But so far, it flops.”

I touched on this briefly in my new column in Print Magazine, but this is a much more thorough indictment of the Cupertino company’s apparent willingness to rest on its typographic laurels. Read all eight of Cole’s complaints here.

Infuriatingly, AT&T’s plans to sell a new device designed to help boost its notoriously spotty cellular network signal.

The size of a couple of decks of cards, these mini-towers act and look like Wi-Fi hot spots at cafés, and redirect cellphone calls from congested cell towers to home Web connections.

So if you have terrible service in your apartment, as many AT&T customers I know do, you will now have the privilege of buying a device that costs over US$100 in order to improve the service that AT&T is not delivering successfully to you.

I’m reminded of the company’s “You Will” ad campaign from a few decades ago, in which they postulated various miraculous innovations in future communications technology, asking if you’ve ever, for example, “opened doors with the sound of your voice?” The promise was that “You will,” and it would be AT&T that would make it happen.

Well, have you ever paid a company to fix a service you already pay for? You will.

“Some of the world’s biggest, most profitable corporations enjoy a far lower tax rate than you do — that is, if they pay taxes at all.”

Photographer Simon Hoegsberg’s 100 meter-wide photograph capturing “one-hundred seventy-eight people, all shot in the course of twenty days from the same spot on a railroad bridge on Warschauer Strasses in Berlin in the summer of 2007.” Aside from being technically stunning, it’s also an understated narrative triumph: every figure in this image, silhouetted starkly and brilliantly against a neutral sky, tells through his or her particular facial expressions and body language a distinctive and thoroughly original story all their own. One of those few photographs that I not only admire but wish that I’d taken myself.

Via Photojojo.

Frank Chimero appears to be advocating that designers investigate more aggressively the horizontal dimension in creating online reading experiences, as this blog attempts to do with some nifty landscape scripting. However, he cautions: “We may be able to kiss our scroll bars goodbye, but only if the implementations are seamless and better than the existing paradigm.” Very true. I think horizontal scrolling in desktop experiences is probably a nonstarter, but the idea has more than a fighting chance on the iPad.