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Gasteracantha cancriformis, the Spiney-backed Orb Weaver / Smiley-faced Spider is a cool spider, too...

And then there are the colorful camouflaged crab spiders that we’d find hiding in flowers waiting to catch unsuspecting pollinators. These spiders could be yellow, white, green, gray, even pink.

My other favorites were the Common Garden Spider/Yellow Garden Spider, an Argiope, which produces a huge, very strong web with a zig zag strip in its middle. When alarmed, they start swinging on the web, making it sway wildly back and forth. ...

The Green Lynx Spider which we had in Missouri, a gorgeous ambush-hunting bright green spider with spiny legs, unfortunately not a common sight since they are very well camouflaged.

In Illinois my Mom’s magnolia tree often had a peculiar spider that made a miniature net that it would stretch apart with the tips of its legs like a rubber band and use to lunge at or more often drop over prey. It was called the Ogre-faced Spider, one of the Deinopsis types. Definitely not cute but amazing.

Here in Florida is the Golden Orb Weaver of the genus Nephila, and which is sometimes called a banana spider [though it is not the infamous unrelated banana spider of Central America], which makes very large gold colored webs, and unlike the other spiders has a tendency to make them in family groups. The males are quite small and build their little webs adjacent to the females’ but when visiting her take care to stay on the opposite side of the web from her to avoid becoming a meal, though I have yet to see a male get hurt by a female. Maybe where prey is abundant he gets spared.