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)