EE in the Wild: Typedia

After a long journey developing the site, Jason Santa Maria and a crew of talented individuals launched Typedia this morning.

What’s Typedia? It’s a “shared encyclopedia of Typefaces” which is curated by the community. To participate, you just need to create a user account.

Of course Typedia is running ExpressionEngine and here’s a little info about it from Jason’s blog post on the launch:

After trying to build a custom backend couple of times, we realized we were wasting time rebuilding common site functionality and ended up using ExpressionEngine instead, albeit a seriously customized installation of it.

For now, we’re using Flash for type specimen display. It’s not unlike sIFR, though much more custom-tailored for our needs. We realize Flash isn’t the ideal way to display type, but after trying and evaluating all the solutions we could think of, Flash won out due to copyright concerns, consistent rendering, and flexibility. We hope to grow into a better solution someday.