Get a great inspiration fix from iLoveTypography.com’s interview with Jos Buivenga, one of the great new type designers that offer superb free typefaces. Jos’s work is a result of years of self-taught discipline and passion for type, and I highly recommend his typefaces and his blog any time you are in the mood for something beautiful.
Last year, the web generated a fiery discussion around the revival of @font-face, the nifty css way of including custom fonts in web pages. A List Apart has a great article about how you can use this old thing (@font-face has been around since css2, but no one implemented it, partly due to the copyright issues that it would have generated; or so I remember). Safari 3.1 is the first browser that implements this. The thing works in both the Mac and Windows versions and it looks really amazing.
I was reading Jos’s approach on licensing fonts for use with @font-face. He asks that a link to his website should be put in the css, next to the @import line. I thought of an alternative.

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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.

EDIT: Ok, I did win. Not the book, I will buy it! But I’ve been featured on FontShop, which is a great win by itself. Now I should add FontBook to my wishlist. Oh, and start posting some real stuff. And finish the design.

Instead of thinking about posting some real useful/interesting stuff, I’m populating this website with things that pass. Not that they are not great, because indeed they are. I just need some content to fill this up a bit, so I can finish my design.
I’m waiting for the results of the FontBook competition over at iLT and I think I might win. In the meantime, I won a Helvetica Film DVD copy in a contest on kupuk.com and I want to thank Paul (again). The documentary is great and I will enjoy the extra 90 minutes of interviews.