THE modern Japanese writing system is pretty complicated. It uses three scripts: Kanji and two syllabaries called Kana. The first one uses ideograms from Chinese characters. Kana consists of Hiragana, used for native Japanese words, and Katakana, used for foreign borrowings. Katakana are characterized by short, straight strokes and are the simplest of the Japanese scripts, and I believe the set you see on this page is Katakana. Keinosuke Sato and Shoyu Ohmachi designed this particular font.

BEFORE tourists flocked at the base of the great pyramid, writer Gustave Flaubert and photographer Maxime Du Camp made a journey through Egypt. In 1849 and 1850 they visited all the great monuments, like the pyramids of Giza and the ancient settlements of Luxor. The pyramids were at that time just sleepy piles of stones instead of the epicenter of a tourist industry. Some of the monuments were even half covered with sand. Considering it was just ten years after the invention of photography, Du Camp did a very impressive job.

IF you have the desire to climb a glacier or a frozen waterfall, you need a pair of these bad boys. They are called crampons and are attached to outdoor footwear to provide traction on snow and ice. Crampons are mostly made of hardened steel, or lightweight aluminum. The front is used for vertical ice climbing. They remind me a bit of the clenched feet of Wolverine.

TO promote a font you don't need a model. The font has to sell itself. But if the advertisement lacks a human touch, it’s always possible to compose a figure out of the letters. The Monotype Corporation Limited did it with the use of their ‘Monotype Century Schoolbook Composition’. The result is some kind of Mesopotamian warrior with a beard made from the letter C.

ONCE there was a time when you could make advertisements for cigarettes like this one from Lucky Strike. The brand for real man. The copy reads  ‘A man’s world. A thousand horsepower goes to sea. 50-60-70 knots. Strong hands on the wheel fight the kick of the waves. In a man’s world, a man’s cigarette. For man-size flavor, man-size satisfaction – Lucky Strike.’  For this kind of ads nowadays I guess you have to go to Russia.

FINSTA is a cold war kid from Western Europe. Sweden to be precisely. You can see in his style that he’s grown up in a time when the United States was a place that not only provided protecting against the Russians, but also dominated popular culture. Our fascination with the New World started with Alf, the  A-Team and E.T. After that Yo! MTV Raps, the book Spraycan Art from Henry Chalfant and comics from Robert Crumb and Vaughn Bode influenced a generation. See more work from the illustrator here.

WILLIAM Howard Taft was the last president of the United States that wore a moustache (in office 1909-1913). The last bearded president was Benjamin Harrison (in office 1889-1893). The hairstyle of Jimmy Carter (in office 1977-1981) was a seventies look and the coupe of Ronald Reagan (in office 1981-1989) was eighties. Illustrator Christina Christoforou focused for the New York Times only on the hair of the 44 presidents. Check out all of them here. She also did the hair of the first ladies and rock bands.

THE evolution of spectacles went in an orderly fashion. It started with a frame for one lens. After a while the two-lens variant appeared. The fittest for survival are now the three lens eyeglasses. The first two Cyclopes are advertisements made for the magazine Zoom. Roman Cieslewicz from the agency Mafia designed the ads in the early seventies. Pieter Brattinga made the poster for an exhibition for the Japanese artist Shinkichi Tajiri. The last image is a repost of work from Koji Iwagami.

STEPHEN C. Henkel has a fixation on bicycles. He even wrote a book on the subject called Bikes ‘A How-to-do-it Guide to Selection, Care, Repair, Maintenance, Decoration, Safety and Fun on your Bicycle.’ And with a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton I guess he was the right person to do that. The cool thing about the book is that the author also made the illustrations. For instance, he drew types of handlebars and the all the parts of a rear wheel hub. The Chatham Press published the book in 1972.

THEY say that crisis brings out the best in people. That was certainly true during the hyperinflation that hit in Germany in the early twentieth century. The rates dropped so fast new money had to printed all the time. Sometimes the federal bank couldn’t keep up. In response, towns and companies started making their own money to pay to workers and residents. In 1918 painter and graphic artist Wenzel Hablik designed these emergency banknotes for the city of  Kreis Steinburg. The typography reminds me a bit of the psychedelic posters of Wes Wilson. Check out more notes Wenzel Hablik here. They belong to an immense collection of emergency money.