Portrait of Matthew Carter, Type Laminitis

You may have noticed that the previous post on The FontFeed was published on April 2nd, 00:01, while the time stamp of the one before that reads March 31st on 23:59. Yes, I guess we don’t do April Fool’s jokes on The FontFeed. When discussing the option with Typographer.org’s David John Earls – one of my writing mentors and my conscience for my online activities – he remarked dryly that I had to ask myself if I made a living as a comedic writer. Like Anil Dash explains in his three year old blog entry Your April Fool’s Joke Sucks:

Really, it does. April Fool’s works really well if you’re either genuinely funny or if you make something that’s plausible enough to actually trick someone for a while. “Just do something stupid” need not apply. And it’s especially hard to be appropriately clever on the web.

Yet this certainly doesn’t mean we’re sourpusses over at The FontFeed, and we can appreciate a good joke, even if it is a completely unintentional one. The aforementioned David John Earls pointed me to this delightful post on H&FJ News, Notes & Observations, the blog of the Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. It looks like the Washington Post Arts Beat portrait of Matthew Carter A Special Type: Font Designer Enjoys “Life Sentence” as Man of Letters made its way to a certain Giovanni’s blog, by means a little detour through translation software it seems. One can only guess by which language the article was filtered, but the resulting text is… odd, and at times hilarious.

Reminds me of an older Unzipped article of mine, and the outrageous Engrish website.
Header image: Mr. Carter at the premiere of Helvetica at TypeCon2007 Seattle, by Isaías Loaiza
Typeface: Alisal

Tags: Arts Beat, funny, Matthew Carter, The Washington Post, translation software