Gerrymandered districts are perhaps the most visible forms of political corruption, dramatically redrawn into implausible shapes to benefit one political part or another. The idea for this font dubbed “Gerry” by Ben Doessel and James Lee explores just how many forms these places are bent into — as it turns out, one can make an entire alphabet out of them.

“To ensure the eroding of democracy isn’t an issue that is lost in the news cycle, our design team from Chicago concocted a creative way to keep our warped voting districts top-of-mind,” says the font’s makers. “What looks like a ‘G’ is really the 4th Congressional district of Ohio, the ‘E’ is actually Missouri’s 6th district, and so on.”

The font, downloadable for free, started with Chicago’s 4th District, which the designers noticed had a distinctive “U” shape. Searching around, they found more and more letters, and realized they could create a full typeface from their discoveries. Since then, gerrymandering has stayed in the spotlight, and Gerry has been used on things like the US constitution. Its hard-to-read letters make it less than ideal for legibility, but that isn’t the point — the message is in the shapes themselves.

Resurrecting the signature writing styles of famous musicians and songwriters, this series of downloadable typefaces puts the unique scrawls of performers passed in the palm of your hand(-held device).

Designers Nicolas Damiens and Julien Sens drew from handwritten notes by David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, Leonard Cohen and Serge Gainsbourg to create these free fonts. Some came from song-related writings — Cobain’s, though (morbidly enough) was crafted in part from his suicide note.

Each one reflects elements of the source artist. Cohen’s stylized letters, Lennon’s well-ordered words, and Cobain’s erratic characters all say something about the person who created them.

Accompanying images of each artist and the letters, notes and notebooks they scratched away in also provide some context for each creative, illustrating how they worked in a time before computers and typing more fully took over the world.

Pop quiz: can you identify these iconic companies by their typefaces alone? Italian graphic designer Emanuele Abrate decided to run an experiment of sorts and trade names for fonts. In his renderings, iconic (non-text) elements sometimes give the brand away, but even without those the color scheme and type can provide clues.

Called simply Logofonts, it spans famous commercial brands including Nike, Spotify, Instagram, Facebook Twitter, Adobe and AirBNB.

Abrate is an art director focused on identity design, and decided to see what he could learn by reverse-engineering these classic graphics.

Perhaps not surprising upon reflection, but most of these major companies use relatively obscure fonts — even if they look a bit like familiar ones, they are a bit more unique than one might guess at a glance.

Braille type is often included as alongside conventional letters, but “Braille Neue” typesets blend both visible and tangible characters in the same space, creating hybrid alphabets that anyone can read. Developed by designer Kosuke Takahashi, the solution is simple and elegant, giving equal priority to both sighted and visually impaired people.

The trick, essentially, is to use the two-by-three point layout already employed in the braille alphabet as a framework for the overlapping visual text. As a secondary effect, the visible overlap helps educate those who can see it about braille equivalents.

Takahashi has developed both Japanese (Braille Neue Standard) and English (Braille Neue Outline) variants. Theoretically, these could also be used to “print over” existing texts — as in: lay ink over braille or even vise versa in some cases.

Specifically, though, the typeface’s creator hopes this solution will be employed in signage for the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics in 2020. After all, those represent a time and place designed to bring people together.

Braille is named after its creator, Louis Braille, a Frenchman who lost his sight as a result of a childhood accident. In 1824, at the age of fifteen, he developed a code for the French alphabet as an improvement on night writing. He published his system in 1829. The second revision to this touchable type system, published in 1837, was the first small binary form of writing developed in the modern era.

What started as a project to create a few letters for an album cover morphed into an entire alphabet derived from the collective contributions of this Swedish punk band.

Bassist Anton Bolin was working on the new record’s graphic design and “wanted to do something that suits the dirty hardcore punk we play. So I started to pee a logo and when it was done, I realized that it would be a refreshing typeface for the world to see.”

The half-year process involved urinating on bed sheets, photographing them and then turning them into vector formats using digital software. Rapid dehydration was a challenge — in each attempt, a letter had to be made in a matter of seconds if at all.

A lot of testing was involved in the selection and stretching of sheet material as well to achieve the desired effect. To save anyone interested in replicating the process some time and trouble, the band’s album also includes a quick-and-dirty DIY tutorial on making urine-based type.

“It was so limiting to have to adapt to your bladder,” said Bolin. “On a good day you had three maybe four attempts to create a letter.” The results, though, were worth the wait. The resulting typeface looks dynamic and organic, much like the streams of urine that went into its creation. Pissjar Sans (“a typeface made of piss”) is also available for free from the band’s website.