What began nearly 8 years ago as an experiment in multi-stage, multi-resolution pixel serif type drafting (starting smallish then manually upscaling x4), took on the robust character you see here after countless edits and some tricky lessons learned along the way.
The initial weight was on the light side (cloned privately for posterity), so I took a leap into this bookish weight by fattening each glyph copy-pasted 1 pixel shifted both up and to the right. A rudimentary technique, by no means novel, yet almost wholly effective. I saw fit from here to only make a handful of corrections, keeping the slightly rounded and slanted serif shape that resulted as well as the subtle reenforcing of a pen-nib construction.
More intriguing is the 1-bit “anti-aliasing” scheme I found myself progressively guided toward while finding the lines of these curves developing the initial light weight. Implied diagonals and said curves – as well as refinement of contrast – are substantially more granular and specific than had I taken a black-and-white posterized, or stairstepped approach.
At half-resolution, the resulting smoothness is acceptible. This type of hinting will be useful in developing a substitution rule set consisting of subpixel slanted or curved bricks to produce a “vectorized” version.
Indeed, such a process could be purely automated by a proficient developer or properly trained neural network (this would be a really interesting future feature for fontstruct pro – rather than hinting a font after painstaking vector construction, why not reverse the process by way of en vogue ai-assisted upscaling?).
Basic accented charaters and numerals are being added as I churn through the extended character set...
The ultra-low resolution of this grid may be difficult to grasp without cloning. Fontstruct’s logo has a nominal x-height of 3 bricks, by comparison.
The level of detail, control, and finesse possible in a given fonstruction depended mostly on resolution prior to the recent advent of stackable composites. Did you want it better? Make it bigger!
Brute force, now meet Elegance.
Instead of building individual glyphs hundreds of bricks tall, stackable composites allow us to design rich modular schemata hundreds of bricks deep. Using curved bricks at their largest scale, linear and curvilinear elements dynamically harmonize and oppose. As well, screen fonts can be effectively hinted (aside from notable lack of kerning controls) without sacrificing the integrity of joins and intersections. And the trapping possibilities, Oh the sweet sweet trapping possibilities...
Please, vote kindly and stay tuned for more :)
This is a cloneA serif font made of dots. Suggestions are welcome.
UPDATES:
07/06/13-07/07/13 I went over the font and tidied it up. Adjusted spacing on letters like V and q, added or erased dots to letters such as a and f, made the tittles and such bigger, and refined letters like O and g. V1.2.0
10/01/13 More refining, more refining... Each time I come back, I see things that need improving. V1.3.0
12/19/13 My biggest update yet (literally). I've increased the circles' size from two to four units, making overshoots and much more possible. Every character has been reworked to fit the new size, and the font is now generally more condensed. V2.0
05/14/14 Tweaked many shapes with the nudge tool, and adjusted the 4 to have serifs and a lower crossbar. V2.1
05/17/14 Big edit today. A large portion of the lowercase, as well as some of the uppercase, has been narrowed to match the rest of the font.
05/21/14 M, N and accents updated a bit more.
09/27/18 Fixed the acute on ý (it was previously a grave).
Pixel-rounded version of zhowfrakt. Another point of view, more "organic".
This is a clone of zhowfrakt eYe/FS