The wonderful iLT blog gave me a great idea with one of their recent Sunday Type articles. Johno summarized it rather brilliantly: “how about the word typography constructed from typographic terms?” Read the article to see that in context.

Now, I really liked this. I linked it with the fact that they’re now running a type terms series and… well, I just could not not do it. It was a challenge, and it took a while, but it’s done. And I’ve expanded my typo-cabulary. Each letter refers to a certain part of typography, and is built by words that describe it.

Here’s the full piece. The definitions for each word can be found on a separate page. Enjoy and comment away, I really like comments :)

Typography by Vlad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

I’m working on a piece for a few days, and it’s still not ready. Usually, I give up after a few tries, but this one is getting out really well. It’s a typography-related thing, so don’t miss out. Our favourite typography blog iLT inspired it and I almost finished it. Such a great feeling, the almost finished state: all the hard work is done, you fine tune, trying to perfect it, and soon you’ll get it out on the world.
Meanwhile, a few of typography’s friends started some sort of a thread: expressive words. The idea is to take a few words and use typography to express their meaning, without changing the letterforms. Check out these great exercises by Karly Barret, then Matt Jewel’s response and yet another one from Geof.
Now it’s my turn. I would like to say that I limited myself to Helvetica. I wanted to really stretch this to its limits. Maybe there’s someone to take the challenge?
I really liked “bloom” in all of the above. And I couldn’t do it. I was thinking to giving the impression of a flower; in the end, it really feels like a fountain to me, due to the lowercase m.

The next word I want to show to you is magic. I really can’t think of another more pleasant way to write this than Karly’s piece. But I did try, this one is a real challenge. At first, I wanted to emulate a magic number, and I ended up with the big m functioning like two cabins… abracadabra and the letters a and g get transformed into i and c. Do you perceive it as such? Maybe the other one is better, more subtle.

My take on jump is a bit boring. It’s close to what Matt did, but mine is horizontal.

The first word that I actually designed was lost. I wanted to end with it because I think it’s better than the others. The letter s is lost to the other three, being placed in another space. After a good night’s sleep, I realized that this idea would go so much better for a word like hidden. Although lost could mean hidden, it’s a bit of a stretch. So, I think of my lost as being more abstract :)

In the end, I decided I should get a totally random word. I remembered thefreedictionary.com has a Word of the day feature. Yesterday’s word turned out to be walloping. As a noun, it means “A sound thrashing or defeat.” I instantly saw the picture in my head, and here’s the result:

Please comment away! Any feedback is most welcomed.

All you Wordpress users probably know this already, but I really want to write about it. Wordpress 2.5 is being designed by Happy Cog and will be released shortly. Everybody knows who Zeldman, Santa Maria and Danzico are, so naturally I’m waiting for it like it’s chocolate day. The word is on the streets from before the 19th of March, but well, I don’t care much about the Wordpress dashboard, so I haven’t seen it until today.

Do not fear though, as the new dashboard is one of the neatest features of 2.5. I’d say, it was about time. This, toghether with multi-file uploads, galleries, full-text feeds and cool one-click plugin updates makes the release interesting. But what makes it hot is the fresh take on design. More on this, when it’s done.

I’m constantly experiencing life without rules: I’m disastrous at organizing myself and everyone knows that. Chances are lots of people are like me, or, heavens forbid, even worse than me, but this is not a thing I take pride in. Honestly, I don’t see any reasons to look on the other side and try to see how green is their grass, since that does not help at all with solving one’s problems. What I do need is some rules. Yes, I need regulations.

I also think work is important, because it brings money. Therefore it needs to be efficient. From here, the paradox: work it’s not pleasant, but you always want more (money). So, naturally, I want to start by making some rules for my work.

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