Inspired by a font I saw in a children's book. The artist had drawn a map of the world on canvas and used a tiny serif font to label important points on the map. The letters had such a cute hand-made feel to them that I just had to recreate it in FS.
Uppercase letters are 6 grid squares (3 bricks) tall; lowercase are 4.5 (2.25 bricks). IIRC nudging had recently been introduced; this definitely would have been impossible without it.
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...
Carthage Sans LKE is an expanded version of my Carthage Sans font, which in itself is a reimagining of Apple's Espy Sans 12 bitmap font. It aims to cover as much as possible of the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek blocks of the Unicode standard (thus the initials -- "Latina, Kirilitsa, Elleniki"). I'm open to expanding it to any of the other scripts Unicode covers, but I have little to no personal experience with most other alphabets; if you'd like to contribute, I'd particularly be interested in Arabic, Devanagari, Katakana, Hiragana, Armenian, and Hangul. (I would like to add Hebrew as well, but it's hard to get the diacritics right in what's essentially a pixel font. We'll see.) The current status as of 10/28/2015 (the date of initial publication):
-Latin: all of Latin-1, Latin Extended-A, and "Even More Latin"; Latin Extended-B is missing some characters that seem to be mostly either phonetic notation or obsolete.
-Greek: All Greek characters supported by FontStruct. If you need some of the ancient dialect characters like Pamphylian digamma, they're now in the GitHub version; polytonic will appear there as well, if anyone asks for it. Basic Coptic support is there, although I tried to fit it into the Espy Sans aesthetic rather than trying to duplicate the Byzantine-Egyptian traditional style.
-Cyrillic: Still a work in progress, but all Slavic languages using Cyrillic characters should be covered. The main holdup is Abkhazian, which is spoken by just over 110,000 people in the world and also has one of the longest alphabets in the world; I have no idea how many of them would be interested in this, so it hasn't been a huge priority. (Besides, the PT family from Russia's Paratype is excellent and far better than I could do with most Cyrillized languages.) I've emphasized support for several languages, the most important being Vietnamese (75 million speakers deserve some support no matter how tedious it is to do so).
I've also added characters for Old Irish, Old Church Slavonic, and Icelandic. There's a number of characters used in pan-African linguistics I am not sure if I need or not; they'll get filled in eventually alongside the Cyrillic, but how fast I have no idea.
Carthage Sans extended version on GitHub: https://github.com/csyde/carthage-fonts
I am deeply indebted to Keith Martin (@thatkeith on Twitter), formerly of the UK MacUser magazine, and his Espy Sans Revived project for a reference for the original letter bitmaps; Carthage is entirely my work but it's hard to find Espy Sans specimens in the wild, and his work is probably the best.
This is a clone of Carthage SansEclectic font. You can even make a led T-shirt for a party. Cyrillic caps while remaining eclectic refers to its Soviet past.
See more: Dalliance
https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/987964/grand_hyperion
https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/305748/fs_burtonesque
https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1123407/medieval_robots
https://www.fonts.com/font/linotype/devinne/ornamental-regular
This is a clone of KuliboniThis font, which used to be called Malachite, took me just over a year to complete. The overall design took the longest, and the remainder of the time was spent deciding on how to do the punctuation and the diacritics, some of which weren't forthcoming until recently. It is also older than listed, as this is a cloned version of the original that is no longer on here. I created it in late 2009, or early 2010—I can't remember; and, Minimum was the inspiration for it's creation. :)
You can get its updated version, now called Petahja, on Font Squirrel.
This is a clone