Breakfast foods

The 1980s was home to many funky trends. Recipes and diets certainly had their unique direction. I looked at 40 different breakfast foods in Google Book’s Ngram Viewer to see which ones had peaks in various decades. Included are timeless breakfast foods like bagels, crepes, croissants, doughnuts, and french toast.

Popular cereals like Count Chocula, Honey Smacks, and Cookie Crisp are not included in this list. They only date back to the 50s, which doesn’t give enough of a historical impact. Looking at the trends of 40 breakfast foods, the 80s stood out with five breakfast foods that had very defined peaks: English muffin, quiche, casserole, cottage cheese, and souffle.

See a behind-the-scenes look at how I created this webcomic, and read more details about each of these breakfast food items on my creativity blog at Five breakfast foods that peaked in the 80s

Ultimate Movie Superhero

Who is the best superhero in live-action movies? Will Superman take the prize for being in film the longest? Or perhaps Batman with his record seven movies will take the top honor.

To figure out who is the best superhero in film, let’s make a list of superhero movies. Then average out all the movie scores for each superhero. Rotten Tomatoes is a good place to start, because each Rotten Tomato score is already the average of all the major critic’s reviews. If we average the Rotten Tomato score for all these movies, we’ll get one master score for each superhero!

See a behind-the-scenes look at how I created this webcomic, and read more details about each of these movies on my creativity blog at Who are the best superheroes by their movie ratings?

Most unpopular font

Google fonts, dafont.com, and other free font websites are incredible resources. All the fonts are available as public domain, free, donationware, shareware, or demo.

As with user-submitted fonts, there can be some bad fonts. The sort by popularity feature on many of these sites is handy to bring the best fonts up to the top. Let the thousands of users determine the most popular fonts by download count. Brilliant!

Some of these fonts are absolutely amazing. I admire people who create fonts. It takes much time and dedication—creating each letter, kerning all the letter combinations.

Think about it:

• 26 lower case letters
• 26 upper case letters
• 10 digits
• 30 symbols

A total of 92 characters makes for 8,464 kerning combinations between each character combination. Yipes!

As you scroll through a particular font category, you can see how the top fonts are pretty good. But then, page after page, you start getting into the “uh, land” where the designs get a bit sloppy or just strange.

I find myself spending many late nights scrolling through the endless forest of crazy fonts. Sure, there are some pretty trees in this forest, but there are also some terrifying trees.

A fun thing to do is jump to the last page of results to see the least popular result.

I challenge all designers to use one of these eight fonts in their next design. Creativity often comes through limits that challenge us. Take something that is considered unpopular, and make something great out of it.

These fonts at the bottom of the list are currently unloved by the font community. Let’s bring some love to these neglected fonts. Discover a hidden quality of a forgotten font and shine a creative light to uplift the overlooked.

Please read more details about each of these fonts on my creativity blog: The 8 most unpopular free fonts.