The Art of Hermann Zapf film "was produced in 1967 at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City and in my design studio in Dreieichenhain, Germany... After long discussions and the help of a lot of alcohol we started late in the night. I was sitting at a slanted glass table with a hot spotlight in my neck. Frank Robinson was lying on the floor with the camera ready for a frog-view shot. My task was to write beautiful letters with ink which dried as soon the pen touched the slippery surface of an astralon sheet." — Hermann Zapf
posted by netbros on Jan 23, 2011 - 16 comments

How a misunderstanding about Chinese characters has led many astray. The explication of the Chinese word for crisis as made up of two components signifying danger and opportunity is due partly to wishful thinking, but mainly to a fundamental misunderstanding about how terms are formed in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages... Among the most egregious of the radical errors in this statement is the use of the exotic term “Ideogram” to refer to Chinese characters. Linguists and writing theorists avoid “ideogram” as a descriptive referent for hanzi (Mandarin) / kanji (Japanese) / hanja (Korean) because only an exceedingly small proportion of them actually convey ideas directly through their shapes... [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu on May 6, 2010 - 83 comments

"This is for the guy who needed a card to come out to his parents." (Youtube) David Ellis Dickerson draws on his previous job as a Hallmark greeting card writer to create funny, poignant cards for people with unconventional greeting card emergencies (but he won't do cards aimed at making people feel bad). [more inside]
posted by cybercoitus interruptus on Oct 12, 2009 - 46 comments

Rainbow Brite's fans are apparently more legion than I had known. Don't miss the fanfic or the gallery! With the help of her sidekick Twink, Rainbow Brite struggles on to defend Colorland from the forces of darkness.
posted by mwhybark on May 22, 2005 - 15 comments