In search of a fun post for today, I fell into a stream of typography issues, including a movement to banish the ubiquitous Comic Sans. Chip Kidd, fyi, is so anti that he used Gotham, one of the straightest of the sans, for the text bubbles of his new book, Bat Manga. "As a fan, I have an extreme aversion to computer fonts that mimic comics' hand lettering," writes Kidd in the book's afterword. "To me they are merely the typographical equivalent of bad toupees."

As advice to young designers goes, this is fine. But I was looking for something, well, a little more off the grid. The typography item I found next is that and also so of the grid, it seemed custom made for DART. The story is reported here in the order that items appeared in the media.

Rachel Young's NY Google Earth Alphabet in use, both straight-up and altered.

July 6: The Sun, the UKs biggest-selling paper, reports that a young picture researcher named Rachel Young invented a Google Earth alphabet based on earth forms and structures she found throughout the UK. Housebound while recouping from a bad car crash, she decided to do a typography project. The following report appeared in The Sun:

Rachel said: "I was looking for new ideas and one day I came across similar projects for Australia and Croatia, but nothing for the UK. "I thought it would be a nice way to celebrate our country. But to make it more exciting I pitted myself against the clock and decided to try and do it in record time. The other versions of alphabet landscapes I had seen" she continues, "sometimes took six months so I thought I could definitely beat it." Rachel spent five hours a day for three days using the satellite view on Google to complete her original alphabet.

July 7: The UKs more upscale Daily Mail runs the story with a beautifully reproduced alphabet in grid form, along with a goofy rundown of its place name initials, like "G whizz street at Kingston, West Sussex."

July 9: New York's Daily News picks up the item and issues a challenge to design a New York Google Earth alphabet. After that, the case went cold until:

July 22: The New York Post reports that Rachel Young herself came up with The ABCs of New York. Obviously, there's something missing here, and if anyone out there can fill in the blank, please email your findings to DART.

So far, news reports and blog posts about Rachel Young's Google Earth Alphabets have respectfully reproduced the 26 letters in designerly grid form. I took the plunge to use it today (above). Now it remains for others to embrace and adapt a really good thing.

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