The Super­est is a very funny run­ning blog of illus­tra­tions of super­est heros. Each super­est hero plays off of the last in a very clever way:

The Super­est is a con­tin­u­ally run­ning game of My Team, Your Team. The rules are simple: Player 1 draws a char­ac­ter with a power. Player 2 then draws a char­ac­ter whose power can­cels the power of that pre­vi­ous char­ac­ter. Repeat.

The design of the site itself is is quite ele­gant and simple. Most of the dis­play type on the site is done in a very nice typeface:

Start from the begin­ning get the the feel­ing for the way the super­est heros flow one after another.

I happen to work right next to Mas­sArt and often find myself wait­ing for the bus in front of the col­lege. A week or two ago, I noticed a sign sport­ing the new Mas­sArt logo:

I lit­er­ally, with watery eyes, gazed at the way the ‘A’ crops the ‘S’, and thought to myself: “It’s beautiful.” I then imme­di­ately chas­tised myself for having such an emo­tional reac­tion to a piece of typog­ra­phy and resumed con­tin­ued read­ing my Howard Zinn book.

Brand New has an excel­lent review of new brand­ing and logo in MassTer­ful Iden­tity. The arti­cle also fea­tures a lot of excel­lent pho­tographs of sig­nage and mar­ket­ing mate­r­ial. Also, it appears as though a com­plete over­haul of the Mas­sArt web­site is in the works (thank God). I can’t wait to see what they do with the new one.

Score one for KJ’s alma mater!

I was pleased to see a review today in Brand New about the new Animal Planet logo.

Just as the author of the cri­tique men­tions, I was watch­ing the Puppy Bowl last sunday and noticed the new logo. Every time I saw it, it gave me a little jolt. Not really in a good way either. I kept think­ing to myself “What is that?”

Per­haps it was really just the two Bloody Mary’s that caused me to find the look of the logo so jar­ring. I dunno. That M is really bad though. It just looks like a mess. No matter how many times I look at the logo, I have to actu­ally think to real­ize the word is ‘animal’ and not ‘ani al’ or ‘ani3al.’ I bet my old Typog­ra­phy pro­fes­sor would have a fit over this one.

Blog.SpoonGraphics has a nice col­lec­tion of funky amper­sands. I think my favorite is ElektrixBold.

Harper’s Mag­a­zine has an inter­est­ing story about one of Pres­i­dent Bush’s favorite paint­ings. The story com­pares Bush’s story of its mean­ing with the actual mean­ing. Quite dif­fer­ent things indeed.

Via Kottke.