60's - 70's intergallactic television shows were the inspiration for this font, while it originated as a simple Arial Bold font. Stretched and squeezed through space and time itself, this typeface is sure to have geeks and nerds alike on the edge of their seats and begging for more. 

Original size: 15pt

*

A font which has a spurless, sans-serif, pixelated polygonal look which is somewhat reminescent of fonts used in VHS technology.

A lot of applied science went into this design. It's designed to remain legible on all media in all use conditions, provided that one uses the original size or a multiple thereof. Numerous technologies and mediums were employed to realize this objective.

"Diaspora" was tested and refined for use with/on/against:
     • CRT, LCD & e-Ink screens
     • image formats & compressed imagery (GIF, JPG)
     • printers (inkjet, bubble jet, laserjet, & thermal)
     • analog video & multi-generational copies (VHS, Super 8)
     • digital video (AVI, MP4, MPEG, WEBM, WMV)
     • 3D and voxel models (Blender, MagicaVoxel, POV-Ray)
     • dynamic scaling hardware (game consoles and capture devices)
     • imagery plugins & filters, including image degraders
     • image scaling/interpolation hardware & software
     • image recognition hardware & software

These all have traits which degrade, distort, compress, glitch, or otherwise alter imagery in various ways. This design aims to minimize the loss of legibility from these effects and to attain the best scores possible in various forms of imagery analysis. So far, this has proved extremely useful, as it can remain fully legible even when extreme JPG or video compression are applied to it thousands of times.

A piece of software I helped write, called the Marinan Imagery Deconstruction AI System (MIDAS), is being used on captured images of this font. The end objective is to realize the design which has the best all-around Marinan Interpretability Value (MIV) for all the tested platforms - the design which is considered by MIDAS to be the most legible in the most media under the broadest range of use conditions and quality levels.

MIDAS uses a set of considerations made with both humans and computers in mind, so a high MIV does not necessarily equal a better font - it just means one that the system thinks is easier to visually interpret. Note the use of the phrase "visually interpret" as opposed to "read". MIDAS tries to determine how well people and computers can tell what shapes are, not how much enjoyment they'll get from reading or how much strain they might undergo while doing it.

*

VERSION HISTORY:

1.0.0 - initial release.

1.0.1 - More Latin support added.

1.0.2 - First batch of tests run.

1.0.3 - gjy5&ßẞ were improved, some glyphs added.

1.0.4 - Second batch of tests run. Space width reduced.

1.0.5 - Experimentally converted to a rounded spurless design, then converted back to a plain spurless after testing. A few new ligatures were added.

1.0.6 - Cyrillic and Greek enter development. Many of these letters must be altered to be distinct from their Latin counterparts.

1.0.7 - Some spacing values changed to increase internal consistency. More difficult tests are being devised. However, since only I seem interested in this type of work, this project is going on hiatus for some time.

*

See also: AMFA, a font built with similar considerations in mind

I built this to have the least possible padding at the top of a button.

The 8/6 block thick version

This one's a request from a friend. :^)

A "hullaballoon" is a person who stores up spite/malice/controversy/etc. and then suddenly releases it all at once, like a deflating balloon. Also, the name of one of the many joke bands I created.

This is the 7/6 block version. I've been liking this weight for programming at size 8.

Friendly Geek:
 Good for...
  - Labels
  - Upper case
  - Code
  - Table cells
  - Outlines
  - Display
  - Printing
  - Informality

 Not Good for...
  - Normal Text
  - Sentences
  - Formality
 
 Sometimes Good, Sometimes not...
  - For each display screen size, one or two weights work well

I have changed the 'h' and the '+' to work better for programming. Changed the 'F' to make it more clearly different from the 'f'. Before it was looking a little bit like lower case somehow.

Balloon/block style pixel text.

Original size: 18.5pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)

Friendly Geek is the regular version of Friendly Geek Light. Its widths are all 6/6 block rather than 4/6 block. The outlines of the glyphs have generally been left the same, with the insides being filled with 2/6 extra width.

Here is my fourth attempt to make a narrow font that accentuates diagonals. It seems to be a good programming font at size 10. It makes it surprisingly easy to read upper case consonant names.

Design is as follows:

Monospaced of course, because code pretty much requires this. Code fonts are built for both reading and editing, and when some letters are very narrow like the i and l in most fonts, that makes them very hard to select with a mouse and therefore very hard to edit and makes these fonts very hard to use for programming. In addition block cut and paste is important for programming and monospaced is required to do this easily.

Small sizes need to be easily readable. Sometimes you need to be able to see a lot of code on one screen.

Two Dimensional - designed for two dimensional grid-like work such as spread sheets and programming. Lines to draw reader's attention vertically are preferred over lines to draw reader's attention horizontally (as in most fonts). That makes this font more difficult for reading text and less difficult for reading code.

Glyphs are wide in the center of each letter so that diagonals and crossbars are easy to see, and narrow toward the top and bottom so that the characters pull away from each other and are easy to tell apart.

Bodies of the lower case letters are made relatively tall so they are easy to read in code, yet maintaining a clear difference between the height of the lower case and upper case characters - very important.

From top to bottom: 2 blocks upper diacritics, 1/6 block space, 2 blocks stems and upper case, 5.5 blocks lower case body, 1/3 block space, 2 blocks lower diacritics.

Clear distinctions exist among the members of each of the following groups of glyphs: ({[  ])}   Il1  aes   Ss56$   Zz217?   `'   .,   uUvV   coCO0D   pP   ;:   ~-  to help tell exacty what each glyph is. This is critical in programming.

Numbers are really large. It doesn't hurt at all for numbers to stand out in programming. This is ok because numbers never have diacritics. The 7 has a bit of a scoop so it does not look like a 2 when underlined.

Vertical alignment - The pairs {}  ()  and []  line up precisely vertically.

The dots are large and distinct so they show up easily in code.

Large numeric 'operators' +-/\%^~=* are easy to read in code.

At least one block touches the right edge in each glyph so that Visual Studio can figure out what's going on. This also means that many glyphs do not touch the left edge and some narrow puctuation glyphs have a tiny extra block off on the right edge.

Floating a little bit above the zero line helps in dealing with underlines.

Avoids horizontal strokes to reduce problems with pixelation at various sizes in various programming tools.

Sans Serif (mostly) so that you can cram glyphs together more tightly.

Also:

Diacritics have lots of space since the area above and below the capitals is more than 2 blocks, so they can be added later on.

Looks scripty - There is a bit of a scripty thing going on because of the wide bases for the lower case i and l, so this is enhanced a bit in the I, J, S, U, Z, f, t, u, z and s.

Narrow enough to be mistaken for an informal text font although since it is designed for two dimensional work, simple lines of text are not that easy to read.

A little too thin - A little bit too thin to be easy to read on a pixelated screen below size 10, although it does print very nicely, so I am labeling this Friendly Geek Light, and I am building a Regular and a Bold font also.

Recent Changes:

Made the 'h' lean to the right to distinguish from the 'b'. Straightened out the '+'. Made the 'F' drop below the rest of the upper case to make it look less like an 'f'. Heightened the 'v' to make it smoother.