The Web Development Series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace's hosting solutions here.

The very first Web Font Awards were held at the Future of Web Design conference last week. The Web Font Awards ceremony was the first of its type (get it?) to celebrate the emerging world of web typography, and its aim was to highlight and celebrate the best use of type on the web from around the world.

Users could submit and vote on entries via the Web Font Awards website and at FOWD; a panel of experts debated the merits of the top finalists and declared the winners. We've written a lot about web fonts and some of the top trends in this growing discipline, but we wanted to take a closer look at the three big winners and dive into what makes their use of type so fantastic.

1. "Design Made in Germany"







The big winner of the first Web Font Awards was the fifth issue of the German design magazine, Design Made in Germany.

Even if you don't read German, you can appreciate the design and typographic finesse of this issue.

The site, which primarily uses the font FF DIN Round Web in regular and medium weights, is particularly impressive in that it scales to fit your web browser.

Visit the site and adjust your browser window — watch the text and the design adjust to appropriately fill the area, while keeping its flow and overall structure intact.







The site also uses transparency to really take advantage of new web technologies. Scrolling through the design, you'll notice that the text layer is independent of the background. This means that you can have overlapping text and image effects, which is really incredible to see using just web fonts.

This design won the Judges' Choice and Community Choice awards. We salute its designer, Martin Rack, for bringing such a fantastic total product together.

2. UnderConsideration — Quipsologies







Armin Vit's Quipsologies, a division of UnderConsideration, is a link blog that is both curated and comprised of visitor submissions of "notable projects, stories, and events of the graphic design industry."

The site uses Typekit to serve its fonts and is a great example of how to combine different families and weights, while maintaining a coherent and cohesive design.

The site also has the option to serve just standard web fonts. To us, this is the true testament to the overall design and typographic layout; Even without the web fonts, the site and typography are still top notch.

If you want to look at how to use web fonts with small text, Quipsologies is a fantastic example.

3. Markert Immobilien







The German real estate database Markert Immobilien is a great example of minimalism and layout control. Designed by David Grasekamp of the mowaii creative agency, the site uses the Din Web Pro font to great effect.

Minimalism, especially in web design, is one of those concepts that can appear easy but is actually extremely difficult to pull off effectively. This site is designed to let users discover real estate and look at property listings and get more information.

Most database-driven sites, especially for real estate, are hard to use and lacking in design. That's what makes Markert Immobilien so impressive. Even the database points and the contact form are all styled using web fonts.

According to the entry, even the administration area is using web fonts. Now that is impressive — a front-facing site that also has a web font optimized backend.

Points of Inspiration

The first three winners of the Web Font Awards are just some of the examples of fantastic typography taking place on the web right now. You can actually see the entire gallery of entries and browse through by rating.

What we think is interesting about each of the three winners is that they each represent a different type of website. One is a fully realized digital publication, another is a blog and the third is a database-driven site.

We're so excited about the burgeoning web fonts movement because it doesn't just mean design can be better, it means content can be better. I believe type plays a fundamental part in how content is absorbed and these three winners — as well as many, many of the wonderful entries — really showcase just how much can be gained with web-friendly type.

What are some of your favorite examples of typography on the web? Let us know!

Series supported by Rackspace

The Web Development Series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. No more worrying about web hosting uptime. No more spending your time, energy and resources trying to stay on top of things like patching, updating, monitoring, backing up data and the like. Learn why.

More Dev & Design Resources from Mashable: