Mirkwood 2nd Iteration

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Balanced Rating: 7.40
Average Rating: 7.25
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by Frodo7

39 89717

Clone of Mirkwood 1st Iteration. A pixel font with self-symmetry. Limited character set.
Info:

Created on 24th October 2009. Last edited on 14th July 2014.
License:

All Rights Reserved. No download available.
Categories:
- Pixel Optimized
Sets:
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8 Comments

It may be 'limited' in quantity - but not in quality. This is a fantastic addition to the Mirkwood family.

Comment by p2pnut 25th october 2009

Nice to see the relative densities of the letters resulting in different patterns of 'gray'. (Maybe the space glyph could contain a pattern too?)

Conceptually fascinating – 'fractal type design'. Would have been a good font choice for the cover of this book.

Can the FontStructor can handle a 3rd iteration? :-)

Comment by gferreira_admin 26th october 2009

Congratulations! FontStruct Staff have deemed your FontStruction worthy of special mention. “Mirkwood 2nd Iteration ” is now a Top Pick.

Comment by gferreira_admin 26th october 2009

@gferreira: Thank you for your comment and the TP. A good choice for the cover of Gödel, Escher, Bach? Well, that's quite a compliment. I love that book.

I can only hope I am the first with this fractal type concept. There are some examples of letters-in-letter design, but not in fractal fashion.

I thought about the space glyph too. Actually, there should be a black & white pair a space glyphs. What pattern could it be without compromising the period and other punctuation marks I can't tell right now. I still have some problems how to accommodate B&W pairs of glyphs within the same font. I think, I should learn more about Open Type.

3rd Iteration: A very good question. Back in August, when this idea came I've made a lot of calculations. It is easy to compute the size of a glyph in bricks:
1st Iteration: 7x7=49
2nd Iteration: 49x49=2401
3rd Iteration: 343x343=117649

117649 bricks for a single glyph would be gargantuan size. And here comes Mirkwood Nano, a sub-brick pixel font into the picture. Having just half the height and width, a quarter of the overall size of M. Regular/M. 1st Iteration it could reduce the size of the 3rd Iteration by 75% to a more comfortable 29412.25 bricks. In other words the height will be 171.5 instead of 343 bricks. I've run a test with a single character (it was only a checkered pattern) before starting to build the 1st and 2nd Iteration. It worked, but Fontstructor slowed down quite a bit. I don't want to build the whole set, but only 4 characters, as a proof of concept.

I've already made them in Illustrator and Photoshop. But the real ones in FS won't be an easy cut-and paste affair. The small letters - corresponding to the 1st and 2nd Iter. - end with half a brick on two sides, so you can not use them simply as building blocks. There will be a lot of brick-by-brick handiwork.

Comment by Frodo7 26th october 2009

love the lateral thinkin!

Comment by typophilus50 24th november 2009

This is a good font, however when I download it. It doesn't print out and has another font instead of this one. Mark Titan

Comment by Mark Titan 16th march 2010

@Mark Titan: I'm glad you like my work. I've just checked a minute ago: download and install worked fine. I might add, it was the same with iCollect.it, the barcode font, I've downloaded five minutes ago. For possible errors, first, you may not have to look beyond your own system.

Comment by Frodo7 16th march 2010

Just for fun I've built a sample of the 3rd Iteration. It looks nice in preview, but the font generated by the Fontmortar is useless. It may have pushed the envelope too far.