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BBC News has a good overview of the new £20 note. It has to be the ugliest British banknote I’ve ever seen. The front isn’t bad but the rear, oh my, where to start with this monstrosity?

What the hell is going on with that illustration in the centre? The guilloché behind it makes it far, far too busy, it makes my eyes hurt just to try and figure out what’s going on.

The profile portrait of Adam Smith is remarkably ugly; look at the previous 20’s portrait of Edward Elgar and scratch your head as to why they couldn’t come up with something more tasteful.

What’s going on with the stroke around the “£20” in the top right corner, and why has someone just peppered a load of EURion constellations around it with no effort to make them fit in?

Who was responsible for the punctuation of the horrible condensed sans text that reads “The division of labour…”, and since when did it become normal to end a sentence with a colon, only to follow it up with bracketed, uncapitalised and unpunctuated text? (Is that colon pointing at the design, or what?)

And finally, is that “Twenty Pounds” and “Bank of England” set in Bodoni? Now you’re just taking the piss…

Cartoonist Daryl Cagle points out that the LA Times resembles a ransom note, with a staggering 22 different fonts above the fold on the front page! via Veer.

Creative Review point out the recent redesign of German magazine PC Professionell by Spiekermann Partners. (The name may seem familiar because of famous typographer Erik Spiekermann.) It looks fantastic, eschewing the usual gaudy stock art-laden cover for a gorgeous type-driven approach. Here’s hoping it lasts!

First look at FF Meta Serif. If you’re a typography geek you’ll know that this font going to be everywhere.

Review of Mac OS X font managers. Dave Girard at Ars Technica gives a in-depth comparison of font management software for OS X. I’m partial to Linotype’s FontExplorer X myself, mainly for it’s excellent usability and handy cache cleaning tools, though I’ve also run into activation problems on occasion (with Quark 6.5 on a G5) and it does indeed royally suck.