Plum Blossom

My only entry for the Fontstruct Color competition, consisting of 38 tile designs for the Chinese game of Mahjong (+ tile back).

I underestimated how big of an undertaking this was going to be, but luckily I managed to curb my perfectionism and get most of the tiles done with designs I'm satisfied with. The Chinese characters were traced from images on Wikimedia Commons (1, 2) and then modified to fit my taste, the space on the tile, even out stroke width and so on. Hopefully they turned out looking good and legible, as I'm not at all familiar with the system. The rest of the designs were freehanded.

The font is named (for now) after my favorite of the designs - the plum Flower Tile, one of the last I drew. (mapped to 'w')

Character Mapping

This font uses two mappings for each of the tiles, to the following Unicode character sets:

Mahjong Tiles (U+1F000 ... U+1F02F)

All tiles are represented except for the four Season Tiles and Joker (U+1F026 ... U+1F02A)

Basic Latin

Coins suit: a to i

Bamboo suit: A to I

Charaters suit: 1 to 9

Dragons: | (Red) 0 (White) # (Green)

Winds: ^ (N) v (S) > (E) < (W)

Flowers: w (Plum) x (Orchid) y (Chrysanthemum) z (Bamboo)

Tile Back: *

Possible Future Updates

I'll probably be taking a break from Fontstruct for a while, but some ideas for future improvements could be:

- Change name

- Add four Season tiles

- Add Joker

- Redesign 1 Bamboo tile (Current one based on a design from this article. It was easiest to replicate but doesn't really fit the rest of the set)

- Add character mapping to Chinese chars.

- 3D Isometric view of the tiles

Extra Links

"How Do I Know if my Mahjong Set is Complete?" from mahjongtreasures.com was helpful.

Also this YouTube video from Accented Cinema provided an interesting look into the culture surrounding the game.

Thanks for reading. Feedback will be appreciated!

This is a multilingual font, and will likely be a perennial work in progress. Feel free to suggest the addition of new scripts and glyphs, as well as changes to existing glyphs (esp. non-Latin).

Largest font tagged with 'segment'. ≥191 languages supported from 30 scripts (Arabic*, Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Greek, Braille, Emoji*, Bopomofo, Hangul Jamo, Armenian, Katakana, NKo*, Lisu, Lydian, Ol Chiki*, Mro*, Toto*, Tengwar CSUR*, Cirth CSUR*, Shavian, Klingon CSUR, Nag Mundari*, Multani, Pau Cin Hau*, Hanifi Rohingya*, Bassa Vah*, Phagspa, uppercase Cherokee). Partial support for 6 languages (Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, Hokkien, Cia-Cia, Tibetan). 5 game sets supported (Mahjong, Chess, Draughts, Dice, Playing Cards). 14160 B of ROM for a full hardware implementation.

Turkish users, the lowercase i is dotted without serifs and dotless with serifs.

(____ is next to be added to this font)