The guys at lapin-bleu.net made a sexy little program called the textorizer that generates an image made made up of text. By inputting a sample image and adjusting certain settings such as font and number of strokes, the application outputs a PNG and a SVG (vector) of a texture of text resembling the image. There’s even a textorizer group on Flickr.

Clean, legible, Helvetica is possibly the most commonly used font in design. Heck, they even made a movie about it. That said, it’s still surprising how many of the world’s most recognizable brands use helvetica as the basis for their logos—many with no change to it all! Here are some examples, but get forty of them on webdesignerdepot.com:

Ever have trouble finding what font to use in your project of website? Flippingtypical.com is a neat online tool where you can type in your phrase and display it in your computer’s fonts. Call it a font visualizer if you like. Interestingly, it doesn’t show graphical representations of popular fonts–its actually the fonts installed on your system.

An interesting idea from European communications agency SPRANQ: a font that uses less ink. The Ecofont, which is basically the common Verdana font with holes in it, can supposedly use up to 20% less ink. Works best in sizes 9 or 10. You can download the free font here.