Words that do Handstands

The approach here is unnecessarily constrained because the author is seeking glyphs in advance for all two-letter pairs, "one size fits all", so it's unsurprising that the results are rather ugly and hard to read. If the font were allowed to depend on the desired words, that would add flexibility which might allow automatic production of much prettier solutions such as the artistic "earth air fire water" example (or jwineinger's Princess Bride example)

It would also make the search space exponentially bigger

Well gosh darn it we didn’t invent GPUs just to mine bitcoins!