Artist, designer, and author Josh MacPhee has a great blog post over at AK Press' blog, titled "Twenty Poster Books of Note."

He's got quite a collection of amazingly hard to find books, filled with progressive and radical posters - covering everything from wide topics, like Germany and Northern Africa, to very specific situations, postwar Chicano culture in California and the Black Panthers.

Sadly, many of these books are out of print. Given Josh's politics, we can only hope he'll scan in and distribute these fascinating political artifacts.

On a more visually satisfying note, I've just run across a great collection of high-resolution scans of posters from France in May 1968 - getting to look at rare posters I hadn't seen before, as well as seeing classics in such high quality was a real treat.

I don't know about you, but I'm sick and tired of seeing protests full of nothing but large signs full up with that wretched font, IMPACT (I'm looking at you, ANSWER Coalition!).

For those radical designers among us who either can't afford or don't have access to mainstays like Gill Sans, Futura, or the 8 million flavors of Helvetica and Univers, I figured I'd assemble some of the best free fonts out there that will help make your posters both readable and awesome-looking. And even for those who have all the commercial fonts in the world, some of these free gems have a character not easily found in professional fonts.

A word of caution, however: the general rule of thumb with free fonts, even in this list, is "you get what you pay for." Expect to have to heavily tweak kerning, spacing between words and leading. And don't assume you'll find accents (or even lower case letters!) in all of these.

Enjoy the ten below, and by all means make more suggestions in the comments!

This 2009 anti-Coca Cola calendar was designed by the Russian ad agency Great for its client Deka, a purveyor of fine Russian beverages. It's main brand of kvass (which is a fermented, mildly alcoholic beverage made from bread) is "Nikola," which is a play on words: "Nikola" is a common Russian name, but also sounds a lot like "ne cola," which means "not cola." The slogan to the right of the month on each page reads "Kvass- Don't Drink Cola, Drink Nikola!"

To best understand this campaign, we need to turn the clock back almost twenty years - to the fall of the Soviet bloc. As previously state-owned businesses were either shuttered or bought up by a combination of well-connected former bureaucrats and Western multinationals, soda brands like Coca Cola and Pepsi flourished. The portable and easily stored bottled sodas did much better in such an apocalyptic economic climate - kvass had been traditionally served by street vendors directly out of their large fermenting tanks.

A resurgence of sorts came about in the late 1990s, when kvass started being bottled en masse and several kvass companies started aggressive marketing campaigns - kvass was not only much cheaper than Coke or Pepsi, it was also a native drink (though it technically has alcohol in it, the percentage is so low that it's an accepted kid's beverage). In particular, Deka has been pushing the anti-U.S. sentiment hardest of all the Russian kvass manufacturers - an earlier slogan was based around "anti cola-nisation." While it's always fun to take swipes at large multinationals, it's worth noting the political environment in which these ad campaigns' pro-Russia sentiments reside: the increasing tide of right-wing nationalism being pushed by Vladimir Putin.

The designs themselves are on the whole pretty clever - though most of them are close copies of old Soviet anti-alcohol ads (ironic for a fermented beverage ad!). For the ones I know are copies I've placed the original below it. I really hope I see these on posters at the next anti-Coke action.

Further assistance on translating the slogans is greatly appreciated - some of them seem a little suspect to me.

Some clever political designers in Berlin have emphasized the shallow and plastic nature of a subway ad campaign for Britney Spears, Leona Lewis, and Christina Aguilera by the addition of Photoshop palettes - often themselves tweaked for further effect. We see a History palette, showing nothing but instances of the "Clone" tool; the Layers palette offers gems like layers named "Nose -20%" and "Fat -20%" and a top layer named "****Consume****".

Check out Epoxy's flickr set to get a closer look. Kudos to these German Adbusters! As Photoshop becomes more and more familiar to average folks, creative détournement like this becomes more powerful. I'm sure we all see ads on a regular basis we'd love to add our own menus and palettes to. So what's stopping you? Get a printer and some sticker paper and go for it!