My entry for this past Illustration Friday topic of "ahead" actually comes in a couple of parts. I initially started out with idea of creating a typeface to demonstrate the word, but ended up being distracted by the minutia of the lowercase letters not matching up to what I liked about the uppercase letters. I eventually took the letters I did like and worked up the vector illustration you see here.

If you are interested, you can download the vector letters in the current incomplete form in their Font section of the site. Overall, I liked their look and might go back and finish building the whole font later ... but probably not. The main illustration piece is all vector (really just me getting more comfortable with Illustrator's Gradient and Blend tools) and initially consisted of just the main colored piece. I only added the background text areas because it felt like it was trying to escape from somewhere.

On a fun side note, each of the three text sections also matches the "ahead" topic, in some fun way. The first is an excerpt from the Farmer's Almanac for the 2010 Winter forecast, the second is the article about Henry VIII's wives, and the last is about the future of space exploration and the status of the current "Space Race".

**You might have noticed that the enlarged images don't link out to Flickr, but instead enlarge right here. I still use Flickr for lots of stuff, but I noticed that if you are using the Illustration Friday Link Viewer (which I frequently do), it takes far too many clicks to get to the big size . This is my way of trying to make your life easier. You are welcome.