This is a nearly perfect example of how not to space type, if you want the words to be read. It was a poster-size ad on the side of a bus stop near the 16th Street BART station in San Francisco; I snapped this photo several years ago, but I still haven’t run across a better bad example.
It’s a good thing the names are familiar; otherwise you might be wondering who “Oeune Don,” “Dxe Choks,” and “Mary J Buge” were. Perhaps if you were standing around for a long time waiting for a bus, and you had nothing better to do than puzzle out what this says, it would be effective. But the real point of advertising on bus shelters isn’t to reach the captive audience of bus-riders; it’s to catch the attention of the people driving by – for whom this collection of letters would look like a rickety bunch of yellow sticks.
If typography is all about negative space, this is negative typography.