by innomin
Download disabled
The designer of this FontStruction has chosen not to make it available for download from this website by choosing an “All Rights Reserved" license.
Please respect their decision and desist from requesting license changes in the comments.
If you would like to use the FontStruction for a specific project, you may be able to contact the designer directly about obtaining a license.
A tiny, legible pixel font. All characters fit inside 5x6, and all numbers are 3x5 (so changing numbers don't flicker). This font uses a lot of techniques I've learned about pixel fonts over the years, and I'm pretty happy with the cohesiveness. =)
5 Comments
Yes, a beautiful pixel art, but the very wide design (5 dots) is too easy-to-do IMO (hence quite common nowadays, don't you think? OK, it's more legible, but this wastes the global matrix, esp. in real life). How many years/decades of training you have? (The more compression, the more hacks/tricks/techniques.)
Thank you for the comment! Legibility and useability was my focus here - things like the double-wide curly brace lines to make them easily distinguishable from square brackets, and all numbers being the same width so the font can be used with dynamically updating values, etc. You're right that it's easy enough to fit everything in 5x6, but a pet peeve of mine is those 3-wide M's in a lot of tiny fonts that are almost indistinguishable from the H. This was an attempt (without monospace restrictions) to reduce all characters to minimum legible, cohesive width, and I've been using it in personal projects for a while now as my tiny option. My experience was with bad tiny fonts that were too compressed (i.e. a slanted M can fit in 3-wide or 4-wide legibly, but looks ugly and out of place), and the goal here was not so much to make the smallest font as to make the smallest good font. I personally think the many 2-wide characters here make up for the occasional 5-wide ones, which is why I still use this font today, but your mileage may vary.
I have found that looking at microfonts purely in terms of their visual interpretability helps with designing glyphs. 3- and 4- wide, legible m/w are possible. Two of my attempts are in the attached sample. You may not find them clear enough, but they don't look too much like h/n/u/v to my eye.
Great font, by the way. I am always interested to see how others solve microfont problems. :^)
Thank you zephram, and sorry it took a bit to reply. It's strange to be getting all these comments four years after posting this font... but also awesome!
Your 3- and 4-wide M and W are very nice, but I still personally prefer having at least 1px whitespace between each bar. It kind of eliminates that pause when you're skimming quickly over words, especially when readers haven't seen an N in your font yet and hit their first M, or W without seeing U, etc. In my opinion, low width monospaced fonts only really started because of necessary hardware or physical space restrictions, and I would rather capture the feel of one then stick to all of the rigid limitations that created them in the first place. But I'll be honest, looking over this font years later there are a couple of symbols I would do differently today, and I really appreciate the discussion and feedback I've been getting here lately.
You guys have definitely given me a lot to think about, and I might revisit this issue with a smaller or monospaced font in the future. 3- and 4-wide are definitely doable, but I think the rest of the font needs to be built around the forced slanting you'd have in your Ws and Ms and such.
I think I found this while exploring the Micro tag, probably to see what others were doing about m and w. :D
Agreed on the points of microfont development. Personally, I make microfonts so that they can fit into pixel art styles - onto pixel art monitors in a pixel mad scientist's lab, onto a pixel newspaper a character is holding, etc. Many game engines use a font rendering method that grabs glyph images from a spritesheet, and in those cases one must heed what dpla said about the global matrix - unless one's text renderer is coded to close the gaps on its own.
But I've also written chatbots which can print microfonts in the form of 3-line ascii art, and in those situations I've found that it is best to just let M and W be 5px wide no matter the situation, so that ordinary people can read them unambiguously. The bots can still print an average of 80 characters before their overall width breaks the lines.
It definitely depends on things like screen area, accessibility by other users, and so on.
Nice to see you back! I'm still pretty new here, but I'm always glad to see more pixel artists around.
Please sign in to comment.