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Of the thousands of entries gathered by The Visual Dictionary in its one year and two months of existence, "stop" flares up the most. "Exit" beats a hasty path to #2. "Fire," "love," and "the" follow. The dictionary, which, as its creator acknowledges, is really more of a "lexography" than anything else, serves as a kind of typographers' dream collection. Here, words of all sizes and shapes guide, promote, advertise, explain, warn, woo, and linger. They light up, establish authority, and melt away. They are "words in the real world"—and we like them that way, raw and natural. Browse recent submissions, check out the editor's selection, jump in randomly, or move methodically from A to Z. If you're inclined, you can register and contribute. You never know what kind of letter love may come back to you.

Junk Charts is the sworn enemy of confusion, obfuscation, and over-illustration in the art of presenting information visually. "Chart junk is everywhere," explains the site's creator, a self-described and anonymous "junk artist." For example, in an entry titled "Statistics and liars," he calls this recent American Petroleum Institute chart a "sloppy and deceptive piece of work." Like a Mr. Blackwell for the slide-rule set, the Junk Charts guy pulls no punches in assessing the aesthetic merits of each diagram. In "Stacks and groups," he writes: "This stacked, grouped bar chart is a mess! There isn't much right about it: The colors are blinding, the group labels are taxing, the grouping is obscure...and neither axes have labels." Meowww! Sounds like an assessment of Cher on the red carpet. Thankfully, examples of good charts are also included.