It's hard to impress us sometimes with new display typefaces -- we just see so damn many of them. The ones that do catch our eye usually incorporate some unexpected physical process into their design. Marc Böttler's "Klotz" type experiment doesn't involve anything fancier than wood and clever photography, but it's delightful all the same: each of the letterforms incorporates a simple optical illusion.

Grace Hawthorne presented what she thought was a simple 3-D exercise to her Creative Gym class, a grad-level creativity course she teaches at Stanford's d.school. She showed front-view and side-view drawings of a 3-D object and asked her students to pick which of four 3-D objects the two views represented. "We had engineers, law students, MBAs, neurosurgeons, chemists, Knight journalism fellows," she remembers. Most of them couldn't get it right.