Original size: 15pt
*
A font which has a spurless, sans-serif, pixelated polygonal look which is somewhat reminescent of fonts used in VHS technology.
A lot of applied science went into this design. It's designed to remain legible on all media in all use conditions, provided that one uses the original size or a multiple thereof. Numerous technologies and mediums were employed to realize this objective.
"Diaspora" was tested and refined for use with/on/against:
• CRT, LCD & e-Ink screens
• image formats & compressed imagery (GIF, JPG)
• printers (inkjet, bubble jet, laserjet, & thermal)
• analog video & multi-generational copies (VHS, Super 8)
• digital video (AVI, MP4, MPEG, WEBM, WMV)
• 3D and voxel models (Blender, MagicaVoxel, POV-Ray)
• dynamic scaling hardware (game consoles and capture devices)
• imagery plugins & filters, including image degraders
• image scaling/interpolation hardware & software
• image recognition hardware & software
These all have traits which degrade, distort, compress, glitch, or otherwise alter imagery in various ways. This design aims to minimize the loss of legibility from these effects and to attain the best scores possible in various forms of imagery analysis. So far, this has proved extremely useful, as it can remain fully legible even when extreme JPG or video compression are applied to it thousands of times.
A piece of software I helped write, called the Marinan Imagery Deconstruction AI System (MIDAS), is being used on captured images of this font. The end objective is to realize the design which has the best all-around Marinan Interpretability Value (MIV) for all the tested platforms - the design which is considered by MIDAS to be the most legible in the most media under the broadest range of use conditions and quality levels.
MIDAS uses a set of considerations made with both humans and computers in mind, so a high MIV does not necessarily equal a better font - it just means one that the system thinks is easier to visually interpret. Note the use of the phrase "visually interpret" as opposed to "read". MIDAS tries to determine how well people and computers can tell what shapes are, not how much enjoyment they'll get from reading or how much strain they might undergo while doing it.
*
VERSION HISTORY:
1.0.0 - initial release.
1.0.1 - More Latin support added.
1.0.2 - First batch of tests run.
1.0.3 - gjy5&ßẞ were improved, some glyphs added.
1.0.4 - Second batch of tests run. Space width reduced.
1.0.5 - Experimentally converted to a rounded spurless design, then converted back to a plain spurless after testing. A few new ligatures were added.
1.0.6 - Cyrillic and Greek enter development. Many of these letters must be altered to be distinct from their Latin counterparts.
1.0.7 - Some spacing values changed to increase internal consistency. More difficult tests are being devised. However, since only I seem interested in this type of work, this project is going on hiatus for some time.
*
See also: AMFA, a font built with similar considerations in mind
A medium-res pixel font I designed in 2017 for printing the text of "The Story of Book" (TSoB), a tale which began life as an imaginary joke story and then was actually committed to paper.
TSoB is woven from my and my friends' whims, flights of fancy, in-jokes, and intentional idiocy, as well as contributions from several AIs. The resulting story changes tone, style, mood, and context at seeming random, and is subversive toward its media and reader beyond insufferability. All this was done just to make Trap Farmer Brer Brah slightly more interesting to the very few people who will ever bother to get and read The Story of Book in-game. So this font is based on an Easter egg.
Latin alphabet in an Ashrian style, mostly using a 2x3 grid, and using only stacked triangular bricks. Capital letters represent the full letterforms and lowercase letters represent the truncated letterforms used in Ashrian printing and computer systems.
Ashrians are the inhabitants of Planet Ashr in my RPG video game "Seven Candles". Their signmakers, carvers, and woodworkers used triangular gouges for millennia to make their letterforms.
VERSION HISTORY:
16 Mar 2018 - v1.0 released.
Another of my many doodles. Fun to make!
Finally, a design where all the diacritics blend in and look natural!
Version 2.6
*
Inspired by a comment by jonrgrover.
I built diamonds sized according to the Fibonacci series, then made a segmented display out of them. The design was then carved away to make the glyphs you see here. I used the members 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8. These sizes proved most feasible to work with in this sort of arrangement.
I gave the terminals a flared appearance which I think makes the glyphs look slightly Celtic. The design also makes me think of beach sand and things found on the beach - shells, pretty rocks, and so on.
Fontstruct's first vacuum tube font!
This is a design inspired by Nixie tubes. Since these "tubes" are iconographic, they could theoretically represent 12AX7s, 6L6s, KT88s, or whatever tube/valve you wanted. Feel free to clone and build on this concept.
A stencil design in which diagonal cuts are used to imply angles and curves. It does not quite obey the rules of a segmented display, but it tries its best!
This is inspired by some text I put on the side of the Sheepslayer Mk.2, a flying dragon car piloted by Lyll "Hatch" Soretti in my game Seven Candles.
An attempt to make an entire alphabet by modifying a single heptagon shape. (The "O" is the basis for almost all other glyphs.)
An alternate version of this was made in which I used different bricks to make the width of every line homogeneous. However, it was found that this robbed the font of much of its character. Additionally, the visual effect presented by the increased line width actually made the font less even-looking than it is now. This proved true with and without antialiasing.
A style built on a tall ellipse. Bold line on the left, narrow line on the right. (The glyphs )]}¿¡ break this rule for the sake of aesthetics.)
See also: Proxima Punch Pixel
Version 1.4
*
A variant of Kitchen Sink Rounded with filter sizes altered so that most letters are enclosed within golden rectangles. This is a squatter and friendlier take on the design - good for header text.
UC cloned to LC to make this easier to use...
This is a clone of Kitchen Sink RoundedA 7x7 outline design which is made to form solid-looking masses from the glyphs while still allowing the outer perimeters of words to take on some unique shapes.
Original size: 5.25pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
An experiment to see how good of a hex grid I could make with just the hex brick. Answer: Pretty good!
(Use _ for the blank grid.)
This is capable of some pretty convincing "TV static" type effects, too!
Version 1.1
*
A fusion of art deco- and Navajo-style design. Well, many civilizations used a square zigzag pattern such as this, but "Navajo" always comes first to mind when I look at this design.
*
See also: Badwolf
I love the traditional French biscuits made on the French west coast where Loire meets Atlantic.
The biscuits are thin, crunchy, light, not too large, not very sweet, melt on the tongue, and biscuits very like the original can be made/baked quite easily.
The traditional version has a limited range of letters, enough to write the name of town, manufacturer and product. I've been unsuccessful in finding an image of the font which contributed just a few letters to decorate these biscuits.
I spent some time looking at other type of the Victorian/Art Nouveau era until I had collected enough information to help me design the missing letters. I added the French diacritics, naturally. I think my additions look successful and the whole font looks quite Art Neauveau and in the style used originally.
The square brackets [ and ] make a biscuit shape when used 'blank'.
Bon appetit, enjoy your "Biscuit de l'Ouest".
This is a clone of Petit BiscuitAn uncircled version of Misplaced Baubles.
Most characters have the same height so that they can be used alongside Misplaced Baubles and other fonts of mine.
This is a clone of Misplaced BaublesA fusion between Roman-style text and pixel art - the sort of font that might have existed in old 80s font software. It's fairly wide and verbose and is something of a colossus among pixel fonts.
*
Original size: 13pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
A slightly chimeric sci-fi design with no relation to Space Blam, Space Clam, Space Cram, Space Dam, Space Fam, Space Flam, Space Gram, Space Ham, Space Jam, Space Kazaam, Space Ma'am, Space Pram, Space Ram, Space Sam, Space Slam, Space Spam, Space Tram, or Space Yam.
In making this I attempted to achieve a harmony between angles and curves. You can see it especially well on "B", "3", "8", and "&".
Version 1.5
*
3x3 slab serif. This is based on Wallerton, Anachronistic Gunslinger, an IRC-based "TV show" which I used to write and produce. All the characters in the show were my AIs pretending they were cowboys.
Well, I managed to successfully produce a lowercase for this one!
Recommended: Use with kerning.
Trying a Courier style. The lowercase has a slightly bottom-heavy design, while the uppercase keeps it consistent. Serifs everywhere!
It fits into typewriter/detective type aesthetics as well as rustic and western ones.
This one is made for a friend. We'll see if they ever end up using it. :v
EDIT: It seems as if said friend is never going to make their webzine... so, feel free to do with this one as you wish.
A fan request. This is Minecraft's in-game text font, truncated to fit into a smaller grid and then edited for consistency.
Feel free to use this for your fan games / mods / whatever! :D
*
Original size: 6pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
High-res version of Marengi.
This is made to be ultramodern and ultraregular, just as high-tech futuristic corporations are wont to make their fonts.
MIV: 7.94
Recommended: Use with kerning and antialiasing turned ON!
Supported languages:
English
French (Français)
German (Deutsch)
Spanish (Español)
Scandinavian alphabet
Latin (Lingua Latina)
Czech (Čeština)
Dutch (Nederlands)
Polish (Polski)
Turkish (Türkçe)
Latvian (Latviešu)
Africa alphabet
Pan-Nigerian alphabet
Americanist
Khoisan
Pinyin (汉语拼音)
Romanian (Română)
Russian (Русский)
Belorussian (Белоруская)
Bulgarian (Български)
Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (Српска ћирилица)
Made on a whim as a result of rediscovering an old design (see sample).
It's pixel perfect at 12pt, 24pt, 36pt, etc. :^)
Since the inspiration image had only uppercase in it, I took some style liberties with the lowercase. The result is mildly comical!
Experimental brush/pen thing. Has a slightly spooky look. Because of their tapering curves, many glyphs can render with a "split" or "stencil" look about them. This is due to software-imposed limitations on vector rendering. Designs which share this property can be considered Pseudostencils.
This design is not informed or inspired by any existing typographical traditions. I set out to make the "claw" bricks (as I call them) into a font and this is the result.
*
Marengi Serif. It's like Marengi, but with serifs!
The serifs give this a wider, more open/airy feeling. Slightly less readable than original Marengi, but slightly more pleasing to look at.
------------------------------------------------------------------
MIV: 7.85
Original size: 11pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a clone of MarengiA chimera (fusion) which combines inline-versus-outline, maze, Gemscript, and other techniques to produce a timeless look.
*
Original size: 6.75pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
Design Rules:
1. Square bricks only.
2. A 1px soft border of negative space must exist between lines whenever possible.
3. Glyphs must fill the 9x9 grid to the greatest extent possible given the rounded style.
4. The set of glyphs shall be a heterogeneous mix of symmetrical and asymmetrical forms.
5. Negative space will replace positive in any situation wherein the small grid size or the geometry of a letterform would be detrimental to the chosen style. This includes all situations where any shape lacks at least a soft 1px border of negative space around it.
See also: Terran Pixelcruiser
Version 1.5
*
A font made in the proto-calligraphic style I invented and used when I was a teenager. I haven't owned a nibbed pen since those days, so this font is as far as the style was ever allowed to evolve. It's somewhat lacking the handwritten character my writing had, but this regularity is the result I was trying to achieve. I had no particular use in mind for the style other than titling documents. For that reason I consider this to be a Headliner.
"I" is kerned to itself so that it can be used to make nicer-looking Roman numerals.
*
See also:Basalt Pixel
The Zephiest of designs - a gaggle of Roman columns with gongs stacked on them.