Journal on Flying Fortress Games

Font Minefields

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How We Sailed Through Font Minefields

Independent game studios tend to have strong opinions about typography—and budgets that don’t include five-figure type licenses.

The Flying Fortress Games mockups came back with Gill Sans. It’s beautiful, warm, and makes you trust whatever appears beneath it. Of course we couldn’t afford it.

Charting the Course

So the hunt began. Fifteen candidates. Several rounds. More comparison tables than any sane person should produce.

Ordinary Things

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ordinary Things. Life. Jazz. Food.

Engineering Requires Fuel

There comes a point in every engineering problem where the solution is no longer CSS.

It’s dinner.

I’ve spent half the evening arguing over fonts. Gill Sans is gorgeous, but the licensing is beyond our beggar, bounded budgets.

Bloody budding booming font budget.

And so it’s time for a little food.

Ordinary things deserve to be done well.

What Would Léon Do?

Oh, I apologize. You haven’t met.

From Design Tokens to Takeoff

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From Design Tokens to Takeoff

Read Part 1: Deriving a Visual Language

Design Log

Why Tokens Before Design?

See Part 1 for how we arrived at French Industrial Art Deco.

This post documents what came next: making it real.

From pilots to masons to musicians, one lesson resonates. Masters of the craft make planes, violins, and rock sound a symphony.

Soul can only come once the bricks exist.

Typography is visible, but it depends on everything around it. Colors, spacing, borders, elevations—all need to be decided first.

Visual Language and Web Design

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 20:33:20 +0200

Deriving a Visual Language: How Flying Fortress Games Approached Website Design

When we started working on the Flying Fortress Games website, we deliberately chose not to begin with colors, typography or layouts.

Those decisions only make sense once they express something coherent.

The purpose of this exercise was therefore not to design a website, but to derive a visual language capable of expressing what Flying Fortress Games already is.

Over the course of roughly a week, that process produced three Markdown documents, dozens of comparisons, multiple discarded concepts, and eventually one visual direction that felt consistent enough to become the studio’s public face.

Taxi and Takeoff

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to Flying Fortress Games.

Today marks the beginning of two projects: a new website and a new game. Both will be built in public.

This journal documents the engineering, the design decisions, the successes, the failures, and everything learned along the way.

We’ll build checklists. We’ll write REXes.

Board and strap in.

We’re rolling.