I saw rather taken aback by this package of Bone Twater I saw at the Shop Rite this weekend, though not as gob-smacked as I would have been by a package of Twat Boner, I suppose.
Was amused that the designer of this logo brags about it on her website: http://miabohleman.com/Y-Water. Mia might want to consider making the **Y **look less like a **T **and move it just a titch away from the “water.”
About 7 or 8 years ago there was a little sewing/knitting shop around here called The Cutting Table. They picked some funky font that, while I’m sure looked great in the ad studio on a small piece of poster poster board, but once blown up to 15 feet across, something odd happened and I’m surprised no one caught it… The U in cutting was separated into two parts so the right side was on it’s own. I can’t find a font to duplicate it, but think about what happens to a U if you take the right “upright” move it over a tad"…now put it in the word Cutting.
If the “Y” were at least moved to the right of the name, at least the worst mistake would be “Boney Watery” or “Brainy Watery” instead of Twater. Or if it actually just looked like a - bone - rather than a cartoon “Y.” Funny. It’s not an appetizing looking or sounding drink, either.
There’s a brand of skim milk here in Panama called Vita Slim. They used to have a design that included a silhouetted figure raising its arms at the left end of the name, so it seemed to read “Vita SlimY.”
I see that they’ve now changed their design. It might have taken awhile, since the problem wouldn’t have been evident in Spanish.
The “T/Y” symbol in the OP looks like a primitive culture’s 3-phallused star/swastika symbol, balancing out the death imagery of the skeleton on the other side of the label.
Interestingly, the zoom shots of the Y-Water packages have the poor placement of the ‘Y’ but the actual shots of the packages themselves seem to have the ‘Y’ floating to the right and vertically between the two words. That move avoids the amusing misinterpretation of the ‘Y’ as a ‘T’.
A now-defunct bar near me had posters all over the place promoting their weekly “KARAOKE WITH CLINT” on Friday nights, in large capital letters and a font that made the L and the I kind of scrunch together.
There is a chain of convenience stores here called Lil Peach. Many years ago the font on their signs was very stylized, so it looked like Lil Death. Yeah, that makes me want to buy milk there.
I’m surprised at xkcd. That poster is not an example of bad kerning, but bad spacing. Kerning refers to adjacent letters like AV, which can be snugged up a little more due to their complementary shapes. There are no kerning candidate letter pairs in “CITY OFFICES”.