Yava for James Leevo

My Yava font was used for a German musician, James Leevo's album Home. Quite different feel from the implementation by vintage fashion Discode Vintage.
When I first put Yava font online, I wasn't expecting any of this to happen and it's quite exciting other creatives using my font.

Here is the trailer for his album Home:

Latest information can be found on James Leevo facebook page.

Yava for Discord Vintage

My font Yava has been used for the logo of an Australian vintage store Discord Vintage!

It's very nice of them to let me know about it, because this definitely got me excited! I know it's quite a hard typeface to use onscreen but they understood its limitations and I'm very happy with how they used Yava!
People using your font is quite a surprising experience. I'm happy and also secretly relieved to see something lovely coming out.
I'm especially liking their title for their Tumblr site.

Thank you Tee and Kym for featuring me on your newsletter and Tumblr too.
You can visit their Etsy site here for their lovely vintage clothes.

And you can download my Yava font for free from Da Font website. Number of downloads are 7000 and still counting....

Yava Font Gets 5000+ Downloads

My Yava Font got 5,399 downloads!
I've completely forgotten about the fact I've put it on DaFont website, and when I accidentally came across my font, it already reached that many amounts of downloads. 5000+ downloads in 3 months seem quite impressive to me.

I didn't blogged about it nor advertised it, because I actually started working on a modified version, which I was planning of making available but still haven't got around finishing. The Beta version that is available on DaFont website has very thin strokes and needs to be used in quite a large point size. Since my Beta version seem to be quite successful, I may try charging a fee once the version with slightly thicker strokes is finished. Will see.

Meanwhile, Yava font Beta (PC and Mac) is available for free at DaFont website.


私の作ったフォントYavaが、気づいた頃には５０００ダウンロードを超えていて、びっくり。特にあまり考えずに、タダでダウンロード出来るように公表したのだけれど、結果としてダウンロードしてくれる人が５０００人いたということは嬉しい。
タダで自身の音楽を公開しているミュージシャンとかもこういう気持ちなのかな、と想像。

いずれ、もうちょっと太めで使いやすいバージョンをリリース出来たらいいな。とりあえずそれまでは DaFontのウェブサイトで無料バージョンがダウンロード出来ます。（PC、Mac共に対応。）

The Web is meant to be updated

I've created new top page for my website! It was pretty dull before and I've always wanted to make it more engaging so here it is! Using my own Yava font! I like websites which immediately communicates what are the new and updated parts and I hope mine does that now in clearer and more engaging way.

You can check it out live on my website.

There are a lot of things I want to do with my website and I'm planning to gradually develop it in next week or so. That includes the use of Yava font. I'm hoping to use Yava for most, if not all of my branding. From my CV to business card to website to other things... So those need make over too! I've always used Futura, and is possibly my favorite font of all time, but I like the idea of using the font that's original to me. Plus my friends have been saying that Yava sort of resembles me. It's quite funny how people's typefaces resembles the creator. Especially how my friend Vicke's typeface looked exactly like her was really funny.

Use of Yava typeface probably needs a bit of testing before it goes full branding of myself. In any case this is the list of things that I hope to accomplish in terms of my web design and updates:

Yava Poster and Magazine Advertising

So this is the typeface that I've been developing for the past few weeks. It is called Yava and looks like this:

All the capitals are funky and geometric and lowercases are simple and thin, so that you can mix and match depending on how funky or simple you want to be.
I've also produced a poster and a magazine ad, to promote the font. The idea behind them is to show many different ways you can spell a word by mixing the funky caps and simple lowercases.
The poster:



And the magazine ad:


People work differently but I personally prefer making different rough versions and illustrating any ideas to see what works and what doesn't. I try not to overwrite and I keep on creating new pages or new files just in case if I want to go back or compare, it's there. This kind of workflow was adopted at where I was interning (Agent Provocateur) and it's really good that it stuck with me. It's particularly helpful when you are showing it to your friends asking for some advice- they might actually like the design you once ditched. Again, I got good comments from Duarte and JT the day before the crit. Helped me a lot as usual. Thank you.
Followings are just some of the versions and ideas that I had before reaching the final ones above. I was initially going for the word LOVE and also had this crazy idea of using our tutor Phil Baines' face, showing how much we love him. At late night alone in front of a computer, it was funny. A day after it turned out that it wasn't that funny, so I didn't go with that idea. (But we still love you Phil.)




Full font coming available to download very soon!

Designing Typeface

Currently I'm designing a typeface! I'm using a software called Type Tool and it's going to be an actual Open Type Font that can be downloaded and to be used in both Mac and Windows. So when it's done you can use it too! Isn't it exciting?
This is the last project of the year and I'm enjoying the process a lot. It involves tweaking of so many small bits and it certainly is a good practice for paying attention to detail. I'm creating a display typeface, something that can be used for titles and captions.

Followings are some pages from my sketch book.

Research:

Initial sketches:

More precise sketches:

And big sketches: