Typographer's Scrabble turns wordplay into ransom notes

The limited edition "Scrabble Typography Edition" stores away in a handsome set of replica type-drawers and features tiles whose letters appear in a variety of fonts. However, there are no kerning options, nor can you choose which font your tiles will be, which probably makes this game pure torture for type-nerds, but is likely pleasing to people whose reaction to desktop publishing was "Cool! I can make the world's most precisely snipped ransom notes now!"

Scrabble Typography Edition - Winning Solutions, Inc. (via Neatorama)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: design • Games • typography

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RuthlessRuben

I’m going to be incredibly insensitive here and say that this is exactly the kind of game that typography nerds deserve.

Yes, I understand that Comic Sans sucks, you don’t need to tell me, but that still doesn’t justify subjecting me to a three hour rant about the pros and cons of Haettenschweiler during a four hour car ride.
- The Rizz
  
  Comic Sans does not suck. Comic Sans is a perfectly acceptable font for what it was designed for (i.e. lettering comics).
  It’s Comic Sans’s use that sucks. 99.99% of the time you see it used where it is inappropriate. Don’t confuse a poor use of fonts with a poor font.
  i.e. Love the font, hate the typographer.
  - http://pulse.yahoo.com/_2IM4RFVZ7UX4MGXMKWZF27D3QE Wes Rand
    
    Comic Sans is not very good for lettering comics but it does have its uses.
  - stygyan
    
    Nobody who call himself typographer would use Comic Sans. Anyway, it’s not a good font even for lettering comics. Bad kerning, bad design,etcetera. There’s even free fonts better than that one.
http://tokyofarm.com Spencer Cross

All of the posts I’ve seen about this leave out the really awesome fact that this was actually created by a design student named Andrew Clifford Capener as a personal project, and the response from the design community was so enthusiastic that he pitched it to Hasbro who agreed to make it. See here:

http://drewcapener.com/?/projects/scrabble-1/
http://www.formfiftyfive.com/2012/03/scrabble-typography-limited-edt/

(Also, you need to whip the Submitterator into shape, because I tried repeatedly to submit this on Monday to no avail.)
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  What happened?
  - http://tokyofarm.com Spencer Cross
    
    I’d get as far as the CAPTCHA, but each time I entered the CAPTCHA text and hit “Submit” it would just close the CAPTCHA modal and clear the title and description fields in the submission form.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      I’ll let Dean know.
http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby

Hands down best scrabble board I’ve seen. Came across a £5k luxury set recently that didn’t get close to this.
jeligula

I curse the PDF in how it turned one of mankind’s greatest typefaces – courier – into something to dread. Designers cannot use it now because without fail, the client will say, “There’s something wrong with the font.” Or even more ignorantly, “The font defaulted.” It would have been preferable to simply use the screen display of the font and highlight which ones do not have the postscript to print properly. But no, they just had to use courier to detail which font is missing, making everybody think that courier is not actually a typeface at all.