Tomorrow Elsewhere is a compact, experimental publication posing as a diary from a 20-year-old navigating early-2000s life in a post-Soviet city. Like its predecessor, Fragments, it continues to explore how AI-generated content can fuel narrative experimentation.

Typography here becomes emotional mimicry: each headline echoes the tone of its entry. Sometimes literally, sometimes with naive charm.

The publication features multiple display typefaces from the Typotheque foundry, with the exception of the body text, which is set in Joly Text by Léon Hugues. Given the project’s hands-on, craft-oriented nature, headlines and typographic accents were outlined and embedded as SVGs.

Fragments is a small online editorial featuring texts and photographs generated by AI. Originally, this nostalgic note began as a personal reflection. Yet, entangled in ethical contradictions, it transformed into the memories of an AI about a city that never existed.

Infusing the intentional stylization with the echoes of bygone days, Clarendon Text Pro lends a human touch to the rhythmic paragraphs, giving them weight. Forma DJR Display is used for the titles, with its robust letters standing closely together, reminiscent of the facades of apartment buildings in this fictional city.

This is my most current website for my design alias, Stxrling.Stxdio. As a digital designer with a strong background in web design, I knew that I wanted to use a strong, abstract display typeface to tie my name to throughout the portfolio site on Readymag. I was looking through Readymag’s different font offerings, and immediately came across Birra Saison. What I like most about this typeface is its ability to shapeshift right before your eyes. At first glance, I see a collection of varying strokes with little to no connections, but a longer glance invites the viewer to see the shape as a whole and make connections without them actually being there. This sentiment ties nicely into my alias, as I strive to connect with people through my art long before they have a conversation with me.

Spectral and Basis Grotesque in use for Koryo-saram, a personal project by Yegor Kim.

The student at HSE Art and Design School rebuilt the history of the Korean part of his family for the last hundred years, made a map of their relocations, introduced his own childhood memories and brought it all up into a heartfelt longread. From the project description about the Koryo-Saram (Russian: Корё-сарам; Korean: 고려사람, 고려인; translated):

In the post-Soviet space – in modern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia and a number of other countries – live half a million descendants of those Koreans who moved to the Russian Far East in the 1860s. They received the name “Koryo-Saram” (“Koryo” refers to the name of the Korean state from 918 to 1392 AD, “Saram” means “man”, “people”.) In 1937, during a wave of repression, most Koreans were resettled to Central Asia: to the Kazakh and Uzbek steppes. During the 20th century, the Koryo-saram slowly spread from regional centers throughout the Soviet Union. They ended up in Kalmykia and Siberia, the Baltic states and Zaporozhye, Moscow and Leningrad. The wider the distribution of points on the map, the thinner the ties between the settlers themselves and their ethnic homeland and its culture became. Certain traditions were preserved, replacing the original meanings in the context of the large Soviet country.

Korean words (not shown here) are rendered in Sandoll GothicNeo.

Read the full article on type.today’s journal.

The Websites of the Year contest encourages creators to polish their skills by mastering Readymag’s ever-expanding creative arsenal, create functional projects for clients and bring impactful passion projects to the world. It also introduces the broad public to new web design gems and the limitless possibilities of Readymag, an in-browser design tool for creating outstanding digital publications.

The visual approach to the contest website was mostly determined by the details of our application page. It included terms, rules, a timeline; as well as voting criteria, with geometric shapes appearing on the contest page to dilute text volume.

As for the choice of typeface, we opted for Px Grotesk—which we’ve used in our own Readymag projects for the last two years or so. Since the typeface is a recognizable part of our visual style, we decided to use glyphs from this font and set them to enhance the effect of familiarity and clearness.

The Faces Behind Faces is a digital editorial looking at the impact of Type Directors Club medalists, and the award itself, on the global design and typography community—with first-hand stories and appreciation from TDC members. Since the editorial also celebrates the 75th anniversary of Type Directors Club it’s intentionally close to the TDC style in terms of used two-colored pallet and rigour typography. Our choice of typeface had to strike a balance between legibility and readability, while remaining appropriate for the editorial concept and its audience.

We opted for Neue Haas Unica—a time-tested typeface with a lot of different weights.

The editorial was made with Readymag and is a product of collaboration between Readymag and Type Directors Club.

The new visual website of dancer Finja Kelpe is inspired by the kinesphere – a container for exploring spaces. It defines the plane that an individual occupies and the access to the space around them. Finja identifies as not just a choreographer but as a movement architect. The four core spheres define the architecture for each touchpoint of her visual identity.

After working with typedesigner Michael Clasen on a previous project, he offered me to test his upcoming typeface Waldenburg. As I was in talk with Finja Kelpe regarding her new portfolio website design, I saw this as an opportunity to put this typeface into use: its super high x-height, strong vertical contrast and formal neutrality made for a perfect fit. After doing a lot of back and forth with Michael regarding the typeface and usage, we landed on this identity. I really enjoy design directions that are inspired by science and have a touch of humanity as the underlying factor for all decision making, and this project allowed be to do the same. Finja’s website was built with Readymag.

The Debris of Attention is a playful web project about archaic web gimmicks: intrusive pop-ups and sidebars, floating menu bars, font hostility, etcetera. It gathers some of these annoying website characteristics and offers visitors to free the page from them by hovering and clicking on each.

All typography uses Px Grotesk.

The Oracle Cards of Design Manifestos is a project that aims to open up your imagination and help you through some of the most frequently experienced forms of creative block.

Every time you refresh the page, it will offer a card with a phrase from an important 20th or 21st century design manifesto. It may come in the form of a streamline recommendation or vague meditation—consider it and try to interpret it as a clue for your design process.

The second leta.today’s publication is dedicated to the champion of mass housing in Minsk — the M-464 series.

The tension in the layout is an attempt to draw a parallel with the building density of the districts using the M-464 series. The Flicker typeface by Daria Zorkina was chosen to enhance optical illusion in cover composition.

Suburbs Are Dead is my small photo project. On the site I use Fit for headlines and TT Travels for the rest of the text.

Unlike most booksellers who publish their promotional catalogs as printed booklets or static PDFs, Left Bank Books produce theirs as one-off, standalone web pages. Produced using Readymag, their catalogs’ design and functionality are distinctive and change from issue to issue, with different scrolling effects, bright colors, and interesting typefaces used to promote a “hand-picked inventory of used and rare books that reflect their interest in the creative process”.

The 6th issue of their catalog, from December 2019, has a playful holiday theme. The intro, designed by Taylor Woods, features a giant nutcracker whose mouth opens as you scroll to reveal the title typography. The nutcraker’s face is constructed with repurposed shapes from Ohno Blazeface, which is also used as the typeface for titling and list numbering. Other smaller type is set in Avenir. Photos are by Michael Bucher.

As web content continues to shift from the flexibility of individual web sites toward large silos of rigidly templated content, controlled by large corporations, I strongly endorse this kind of customized, small-scale web design. It offers a valuable low-risk testing ground for exploring new digital design techniques and unusual typefaces that might not be as practical for larger, less-ephemeral websites. The modern equivalent to what was traditionally called job work is now largely relegated to preparing small images for social media posts, which is a shame considering all the potential for experimentation and innovation offered by modern technology and the growing availability of unusual typefaces. (For more of my thoughts on this, see my talk on the topic.)

As a side note: I learned about Left Bank’s web catalogs while chatting in their online booth for the Typographics Book Fair this year. Though they don’t carry many books about typography, they have a good selection of books on design in general, and – perhaps more notably – many, many books that demonstrate interesting typography on their covers or inside their pages. Browsing through their catalog, I’ve found several items deserving of documentation here at Fonts In Use.

“Read Me!” is set in Druk Condensed X Super, with Spectral for the body copy and Stratos Bold and Graphik Medium for the table of contents.

Read Me! is a new series of editorial templates introduced by Readymag. From an article for type.today’s journal:

Readymag has lately been extending its template set; well, now is the time to offer you some new templates for long reads. As we discussed this, our team got an idea to present something bigger than just a plain template: a full-featured material on the evolution of on-screen reading, issues of legibility, certain details related to web layouts and web-based representation of contents. Welcome our editorial long-read essay on editorial long-reads: it is somewhat of a recursion, right.

We provide users with an opportunity to use each chapter of this article as an independent template with its own style and typographic solutions. Apart from various approaches to layouts, we are most definitely focusing on type, and all possible kinds of ways to make use of it. Since Readymag has an extensive Russian-speaking audience, we decided to address the typefaces that support Cyrillic; our choice was largely determined by this consideration. Eventually, the thing has turned out to be very rich in terms of type, in large part thanks to type.today library.

This project by Readymag exemplifies the template in use. Contentwise, it explores how the notion of readability has evolved over years and offers designers some ideas and tools on how to create a readable text.

“Define and conquer” mixes Druk Wide and Druk Condensed. Text is rendered in Graphik.

Part 2 features more Stratos and Spectral, both by Jean-Baptiste Levée. The letter a in the illustration is from Charter.

For part 3, the typography switches to Pragmatica and Times New Roman.

Part 4 opens up with Graphik Super and uses Georgia for text, with one paragraph in Pragmatica. The samples present Matthew Carter’s Georgia alongside its sans-serif cousin Verdana.

The concluding tips section combines numerals from Pilowlava with Karloff Negative for the heading, Kazimir Text, and Graphik.

In the 21st-century, infographics are everywhere. In the classroom, in the newspaper, in government reports, these concise visual representations of complicated information have changed the way we imagine our world. Susan Schulten explores the pioneering work of Emma Willard (1787–1870), a leading feminist educator whose innovative maps of time laid the groundwork for the charts and graphics of today.

This is a web republication of the original essay by Susan Schulten, Professor of History at the University of Denver, and the author of several books on maps and US history.

Curbe by Olga Pankova has been used for title and headings.

Curbe is an expressive display typeface inspired by Soviet 1960s. Technically, there are no historical letterforms—it is more about vibe and style: the script is contemporary, active, broken, dynamic.

Set in Adobe Caslon by Carol Twombly. Mrs Eaves Roman All Petite Caps by Zuzana Licko has been used for captions.

The original essay can be found on Public Domain Review.

Should we consider black a colour, the absence of colour, or a suspension of vision produced by a deprivation of light? Beginning with Robert Fludd’s attempt to picture nothingness, Eugene Thacker reflects on some of the ways in which blackness has been used and thought about through the history of art and philosophical thought.

This is a web republication of the original essay by Eugene Thacker.

Wremena is used throughout, paired with Steinbeck for captions and anchor links. While Wremena is a “a Times-like font” without italics, it seemed appropriate to use Times New Roman’s italics as a substitute for accentuation. Pilar has been used for title.

The original essay can be found on Public Domain Review.

Used by the indigenous peoples of the Americas for millennia, it was only in the last decade of the 19th century that the powerful effects of mescaline began to be systematically explored by curious non-indigenous Americans and Europeans. Mike Jay looks at one such pioneer Havelock Ellis who, along with his small circle of fellow artists and writers, documented in wonderful detail his psychedelic experiences.

This is a web republication of the original essay by Mike Jay. Essay has been adapted from a section in Mike Jay’s Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic published by Yale University Press in 2019. The original can be found on Public Domain Review.

Titles and (animated) drop cap: CSTM Xprmntl 02 Italic (Yury Ostromentsky, CSTM Fonts). Text set in Plantin (Frank Hinman Pierpont), with captions and marginal notes in Freight Micro (Joshua Darden).

Personal website for Eugene Markin, a computer musician and sound artist based in Helsinki, Finland. He focuses on digital art and interdisciplinary practices working on the intersection of technology, music, and social context.

It was interesting to find the internal tension, without making an explicit emphasis on experimental typography. The answer was found in the careless replacement of individual letters in the titles of projects (set in Neue Haas Grotesk). It seemed appropriate to support the sloppy and chopped forms of Rumeur with Avara’s italics.

This web publication on Farnsworth House came out naturally while working on a template layout for the another upcoming project. The publication is based on materials from open sources. Neue Haas Grotesk is used throughout, in both Text and Display cuts.

An updated version of my portfolio starts with an essay on other web.

In the era of countless interfaces, landings of products and services, there exists another web design. This quirky term refers to projects that stand out in their design and content from the usual, standardized sites.

The whole project is set in Suisse Int’l and Suisse Works by Swiss Typefaces.

Personal website for Kane Robinson. Based on original article by Joe Zadeh.

The loose and inconsistent layout is dictated by the absurdity of circumstances and the disproportional punishment in Kanes’ case. This longform is unsystematic, dynamic, animated, whimsical, wrong and disproportional in its’ details. It can be perceived as an attempt to grab the attention at all costs. Even at the cost of readability.