Every week, I abuse myself for your amusement by seeking out yet another horribly constructed web site and poking fun at its awfulness. Doctors and Optometrists write in each week to warn of the damage I'm doing to myself. My shrink is buying a new beach house on the expected revenue to be generated by my nervous breakdown. But still -- glutton for punishment that I am -- I continue to seek the holy grail of websuck.

This week's bin of bargains brought me to MSY Technology (Pty. LTD.. whatever that means). MSY will probably never top a greatest hits list of horrible websites -- with a total lack of dancing house pets, no click the Mel Gibson games, and colors that won't cause psychotic episodes. Those are the nicest possible things you can write about them, in every other respect MSY is awash in sin.

Take this price list for example. If you can make it through 2 colorful stanzas without clawing at your own eyeballs, you're a braver man than I.

by the time you scroll through the second page, you're asking God to bring on the E-bomb to mercifully send us back to paper, quills and candlelight.

Somehow, the marketing genius who crafted this abomination in Microsoft Word felt you'd have the stamina to endure twelve whole pages. That's twelve pages of nearly random font size changes, the word "HOT" next to every line item, and an entire page of warnings, disclaimers, addendum and notes in prologue. By the time you scroll through page one, you've forgotten what you were looking for -- and, by the time you scroll through the second page, you're asking God to bring on the E-bomb to mercifully send us back to paper, quills and candlelight.

What's worse? Customers on one Australian review site not only call MSY untrustworthy, unhelpful, filthy and even downright rude but -- one reviewer warns -- if you call them asking for prices, they'll refer you to their website!

Have faith, Fugly Friday Fan. If there is a just and righteous God in our midst, then certainly there is a giant gift basket of FAIL waiting for MSY's web author on his arrival in hell.

[Via Digg, circa 2006]

Typography on the web has always been a delicate topic, and the source of a lot of tension between web designers, type designers, and standards gurus. Websites should have quality type choices available for all of their readers, but type designers deserve to be compensated for their hard work. The appropriate standard and the appropriate license have been debated for years. Typekit, launching this summer, is one possible resolution to the situation.

Billing itself as "the easiest way to use real fonts on your website," Typekit is a cross-browser platform that will offer a consistent license for fonts, without DRM. A group of type foundries is already supposed to be on board, although it's not yet clear which ones they are. For web designers, using Typekit will apparently be as easy as adding a little bit of Javascript to the site. It will be interesting to see whether it catches on, or whether it's too good to be true.

Looking for a fast, easy way to preview the fonts you have installed on your computer? It doesn't get much easier than visiting Flipping Typical.

Head over to the site and within seconds it will render a table of all your typefaces. Initially the preview text will read "flipping typical," but you can delete it and enter whatever you like. To swap the primary font at the top of the page, simply click on the one you'd like to view full size. You can also switch the previews to bold and italics via hotkeys (control-b and control-i respectively).

Flipping Typical should work just fine on Windows and OSX with just about any browser except IE6.

Looking for a unique font for your next gift card or ransom letter? Graphic artist/creative director Rhett Dashwood used Google Maps to discover natural and man-made (OK, mostly man-made) structures and landscapes resembling the letters of the alphabet.

The project took about half a year, although it wasn't exactly a full time endeavor. All of the locations in Dashwood's alphabet were discovered within Victoria, Australia. So if you don't like the way some of these letters look, feel free to scan the rest of the globe until you find better representations.

[via Gizmodo]

Reading articles online can be a huge pain. Some sites have no sense of type design, or just have too much clutter to give you a pleasant reading experience. Readability is at least a partial solution to the problem. It's a customizable bookmarklet for all major browsers that lets you load a site in a text-only mode to make it easier on the eyes.

Readability offers modes for everyone who reads online, whether you prefer a terminal-style light-on-dark monospace style or a newspaper-style serif. Text size is customizable and can be made extra large, which actually strikes me as an accessibility feature, and not just a convenience. You can also adjust the column width to suit your personal preferences. Readability works better on some sites than others: it's perfect on NYTimes.com, and unfortunately doesn't work at all on Download Squad.

[via Daring Fireball]

Designers know the words "lorem ipsum" all too well. If you've mocked up a layout for anything with chunks of text in it, you've probably run across the infamous Latin paragraphs that commonly show up as filler. Where do you get your lorem ipsum, though, and how do you make sure it's the right fit for your design? Lorem2 is one great way to do it.

Lorem2 is a nicely laid-out collection of lorem ipsum paragraphs and bullet points, both short and long. If you're the kind of person who keeps a text file full of this stuff, you might be better off filling it up with the whole contents of Lorem2. You'll never have to give a second thought to avoiding repeated text that detracts from your layouts, because the solution will be close at hand.

One weakness many users discover when switching to Linux is typography. Fonts are a lot more important to your computing experience than you might think, and although Ubuntu does a good job of providing some pretty core fonts, and the Microsoft font core pack can add greatly to that, Red Hat offers the Liberation Font package which in a lot of ways is superior to even Microsoft's tried and true typography.

But how do you get those great Red Hat fonts on Ubuntu? Matt of TechyStuff has created a dead simple shell script that'll have you typographying (is that a word?) to your hearts content with just one easy step. We caution users about running random shell scripts with root permissions, but we've checked this script line by line and it appears safe; Still, use at your own risk.

I don't have any confirmation on this, but fadtastic says that for the first time in history, Times New Roman is not the default font in Microsoft Office, its status having been usurped in Office 2007 by Microsoft's pretty new star Calibri. The venerable and ubiquitous font is still included in the office suite, of course, and the new version of Office is still in beta and things may be reshuffled again in the months before its final release, but it's still a surprising shift for a company as stalwart as Microsoft.

[Via kottke.org]

Closet typography geek that I am, Logos of Web 2.0 at Stephen Coles' FontFeed blog tickles my fancy. He's dissected a few dozen Web 2.0 logos that you might recognize from this image that's been floating around and picked out some font trends. If you need a logo for your newest start-up, it's veritable guide to making a modern web site logo. VAG Rundschrift and Arial Rounded Bold are particularly popular in the "softies" category, but Coles has you covered if you're looking for a futuristic or classical look instead.

[Via Waxy.org]

Alessandro Fulciniti at Web-Graphics has collected his top 20 bookmarks of 2005. They're all, of course, web development links with a focus on CSS and JavaScript with some design, typography, AJAX, and search engine optimization thrown in. Every one is a must-read for anyone doing web development in 2006.

There's a little design geek inside me and inside him is an even littler typography geek, and that geek loves Typographica's Favorite Fonts of 2005. With fanciful names like Lisboa, Deréon, and Zingha, these are some truly beautiful fonts, but I think my favorite of the bunch may be Robert Slimbach's Garamond Premier Pro, and gorgeous update to the old serifed standby. There's also several dozen runners-up for your perusal, and this is only Part 1, comprising the first six months of the year. The article's writer, Stephen Coles, also notes the expanding role of the OpenType format and the fact that many type designers have completely abandoned PostScript and TrueType fonts in favor of OpenType.