One of those days when I wish I had relevant photos

I've fallen in love with the illustration on stock certificates, especially the more old fashioned ones that mix woodcut-style line drawings with borders made of geometric designs. I've been looking for some pictures of what I mean but this is the best I can find so far. The Exxon and Playboy certificates are closest to what I'm talking about. There are some pictures on flickr too.

I wish I could scan some from work but I'm pretty sure that that would compromise peoples' privacy and get me fired, so we'll just have to wait until someone puts together a flickr photoset or a book that I can actually get my hands on.

The other thing I learned today was that in the Bahamas passports are handwritten. The number and background pattern are printed, but the vital information like name, place of birth and eye colour are all written out by hand. It's not professional calligraphy either. Someone writes in this stuff with a ballpoint pen in middle-school cursive.

I saw a couple today that were obviously processed by the same passport agent. I lack the terminology to describe what the writing looked like but I loved it. It had been written out along the top of a ruler so it kept returning to a straight line along the bottom. I want to make a font out of it.