Hoefler & Frere Jones’s updated website is totally tricked out with a great new blog and a beautiful new Scotch Roman face (my favorite style) called Chronicle. But a secret joy is to discover that they’ve also created their own in-house fictional character, Steve Gibbs. Mr. Gibbs’s bio explains, “Despite the fact that there is nobody named Steve Gibbs at H&FJ, the above e-mail address attracts hundreds of pieces of correspondence every day. A review of this e-mail, most of which deals with investment opportunities, exciting holiday gifts, and various solicitations of a personal nature, is useful in separating the wheat from the chaff in our own mailboxes.” Brilliant.

Phishing, a form of spamming, is the forging of “official” e-mails in order to gain access to confidential information and enable identity theft. An interesting excercize in design for deception, you can see a breakdown of a sample e-mail here. More here. And, as an aside, how to spot a liar through Graphology, the possibly dubious “science” of handwriting anaylsis.

“Census” is a project by designer Wayne Daly to round-up a list of aliases used by “spammers” who routinely fill his Junk Mail folder. Wonderful. This project by Lucy Harrison (via VVork) is similar to Daly’s.