We’ve got a lot to thank Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the computing world’s other leaders for. They’re responsible for some of the greatest leaps forward in communications and business in the last 30 years-and many of the biggest innovations in design, too.

Without them, our industry wouldn’t be what it is today, and many of the world’s top designers wouldn’t have a platform for their work.

However, there is one reason to resent these giants: their choice of fonts. In releasing mega-popular suites and catering to a broad, design-illiterate audience, leading business applications such as Microsoft Word shocked us with the overused fonts that they include standard in their latest releases.

This isn’t a riff on the world’s worst fonts, but rather an invitation for amateur designers and business users to stop abusing some of the world’s best fonts.

Nothing is particularly wrong with Impact or Comic Sans as fonts per se, but there is a huge deal wrong with using them in every situation. The 10 fonts below are overused and patently annoying, and we give 10 good reasons to stop using all of them.

Back in October, talented French street artist “JR” was awarded the 2011 TED Prize.

For those unfamiliar with it, the TED Prize offers one winner $100,000 for a charity of their choice and, more importantly, “One Wish to Change the World.”

The “One Wish” is designed to leverage the TED community’s resources and talent to create projects with far-reaching impact. Previous winners have included Jamie Oliver, Dave Eggers, Bill Clinton, and Bono, among others.

JR will announce his “One Wish to Change the World” at the TED on March 2nd. Since JR’s identity remains unconfirmed, it will be interesting to see how he announces his “One Wish”.

Will he finally confirm his identity and appear in person? Considering that his anonymity lends a certain integrity to his work, it’s unlikely he’ll reveal who he really is.

Typography is one of the most important parts of any design, whether it’s digital or in print. Good typography can take a mediocre design to new heights, while bad typography can make what would be a great design lackluster or even bad.

For web designers, typography choices have long been limited to web-safe fonts. But that’s changed in recent years, first with the advent of things like sIFR that let you replace standard web fonts with Flash for headlines or other small blocks of text, and now with @font-face and web services for embedding fonts.

Below we’ve collected thirty fantastic type foundries. The majority of these allow at least some kind of online, embedded use, either with Flash or with @font-face. But we’ve also included some other foundries with more restrictive licenses.

You can always use fonts from these in images or graphics, either online or off. Be sure to check the license for each font to determine exactly what uses are allowed.

Whether we’re on iTunes or Spotify, browsing stores (both online and off) or watching advertisements on TV or in magazines, it’s safe to say that admiring album cover art is a part of daily life for many of us.t

As long as music exists, the album design industry will thrive, regardless of how we listen to music.

In this post, we will look at over 70 examples of excellent album artwork.

The styles could be categorized as: painted, abstract/experimental, photographic, retro/vintage, minimalist and illustrated.

Scattered through this article, several mini-tutorials will teach you how to create certain effects.