This font was inspired by the works of Christophe Szpajdel (Lord of the Logos, 2010, Die Gestalten Verlag), as well as by the film trilogy and the following game titles (e.g. Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, 2014) based on Tolkien's epic masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings. Given the game theme, and the 48 bricks vertical limit, I thought more or less around pixel art, or pixel fonts. This is my endeavour to make a spiky blackletter in Szpajdel's black metal style that evokes the terror of Mordor at pixel level. This font has been extensively tested for best kerning, yet some issues might have remained unresolved.
This is a clonePixel-rounded version of zhowfrakt. Another point of view, more "organic".
This is a clone of zhowfrakt eYe/FSWhat 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...
This font has been almost 3 years in the making. Mostly because how tedius it was to keep copying the same "bricks" over and over. I'm glad it is finished enough to share. I may or may not (most likely) add more glyphs later.
Reload your brain, ask about everything. Our Future begins in... 3... 2... 1... NOW! NB: Better writing with uppercase. Three alternatives (B, F, T) to improve readability in certain cases are in the lowercase.
ALIEN WORMHOLE (BOLD) - Monolinear Sci-Fi-inspired 'worm' typeface.
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This is a 'Bold' style version to the "ALIEN WORMHOLE" type family.
This version has a ton of extra character compared to the 'Light' version.
For now only the two 'Basic Latin' sets, some symbols and a small number of puctuation marks match. And it remains to be seen if I can translate back to the Light version all those extra's that were put into this Bold version.
I mentioned 'type family' earlier, but in reality there isn't a whole lot of family just yet. Since the two for now hardly correlate truly.
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Here is a link to the 'Light' version
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Stay tuned for future updates.
Cheers