Without diving deeper, long story short, an oxygen tank explosion forced Apollo 13 to cancel its landing on the moon, but the fascinating problem solving of the crew and mission control turned the mission into a “successful failure.”

Making a square peg fit into a round hole

I was 14 when I first saw the movie based on the story, and the scene the most fascinated me was where the mission control collected all the parts which were available for the crew up there, dropped them on a table and they started to figure out how to make a square peg fit into a round hole to fix their losing oxygen issue.  ( Having too much free time? Redo the Apollo 13 Rescue )

I don’t know why, but I get über-motivated by situations where you have only limited options to solve a specific problem and you must come up with your best possible. I feel like one of the people around that table quite often during my daily work when it comes down to doing typography for the web. It’s not like choosing a color palette, making shiny buttons or dropping that shadows, oh no. Designing typography for the web is more like recycling a few - to death-used and boring-old - typefaces in the way that you show something new and never-yet-seen every time.

In a perfect world there were no limitations set for using type online, but we know, things doesn’t function like this, so I say take the challenge and keep pushing that boundaries set by Arial, Verdana, Lucida Grande & a small number of their friends. How, you ask? With discovering all those tiny but together very powerful CSS properties like font-size line-height or letter-spacing, and many more.

Besides that, try to imagine how messy the web would look like if everybody could use his/her favorite typeface, not just the several lucky ones, actually graced with good taste...
( and here, I’m not pointing to myself )