Trying this style out. The name comes from a monster in the game NetHack.

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See also:Gridlarva

A dashed line design made with the new half-arc bricks. The emphasized spurs/stems and off-kilter geometry give it a quirky, almost handwritten quality. Its striped appearance makes me think of candy as well as the Cheshire Cat, thus the name. :D

I doubt the upper case would look as cute as the lower. So I've cloned all LC to UC to make this easier to use...

Pixel demake of Goud. This is easily the best one in the family for body text, as it remains crisp at all sizes!

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Original size: 9pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)

An ornate Goud with lots o' thorns! Now with MORE THORNS.

Rather than serve an ornamental or decorative purpose, this one is made to be as clean as possible so that it works well for body text. It's highly legible at small size, so it could potentially even be a programmer's font!

"Goud" stands for "Garden of Unearthly Delights", the name of an album from the band Cathedral.

Iterated version of an unreleased design called "Midnight Oil". It's also slightly related to Dethzmezenger and Gehenna.

I went against a few of my own conventions for this one. The close spacing might look a bit strange at times, but it eliminates the need for kerning while also creating a unique look. The overlapping spurs make me think of thorny plants!

This is an original design, but it does make me think of Planescape: Torment when I look at it, thus the name!

An extension of ideas present in "Gehenna".

Verbossus in Sans Serif format. :D

Experimental brush/pen thing. Has a slightly spooky look. Because of their tapering curves, many glyphs can render with a "split" or "stencil" look about them. This is due to software-imposed limitations on vector rendering. Designs which share this property can be considered Pseudostencils.

This design is not informed or inspired by any existing typographical traditions. I set out to make the "claw" bricks (as I call them) into a font and this is the result.

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A stencil design in which diagonal cuts are used to imply angles and curves. It does not quite obey the rules of a segmented display, but it tries its best!

This is inspired by some text on the side of the Sheepslayer Mk.2, a flying dragon car piloted by Lyll "Hatch" Soretti in my game Seven Candles.

Version 1.5

An attempt to make a "classroom" font. It reminds me of a font style which was once commonly used on magnetic letters.

Kerning work and language support work continue...

Original size: 15pt

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

A lot of applied science has gone and continues to go into this design. It's designed to remain legible on all platforms in all use conditions, provided that one uses the original size or larger. Numerous technologies and mediums are being employed to realize this objective.

"Diaspora" is now being 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 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 different platforms 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 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.

This same font was tried in a high-res format, but didn't perform nearly as well. This design is made with the medium of its creation in mind and a high-res version would need to make many changes to compete.

If I had a budget, I'd build a website and make a competition out of these ideas... still, if you make fonts that are designed to perform like this, I'd love to talk about them.

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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...

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

Experimental cyberpunk robot mosaic thing.

It gives me a strong "system font" feeling and seems like something that might be included with the OS of some futuristic tech deck. If the Fairlight Excalibur from Shadowrun Returns had its own font, this could be it!

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Original size: 21pt (use multiples of this size for pixel perfection)

Version 1.3

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A modernized, rounded, and truncated version of Marengi. This is made to be a good text editor/chat font. It has very few kerning pairs, so it should render fine in any software.

Ascenders are only allowed to be as tall as the uppercase/numerals, while descenders are allowed to go 2px below the line. This creates a natural line spacing that is readable and not too dense. (Diacritics break this rule, of course... darn them...)

Gone are the curved descenders/termini on letters like gjty. The simpler geometry makes this design more suited to speedreading than its predecessor. In fact, altering those four letters alone improves speedreading on this font by up to 14%!

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MIV: 8.81

Original size: 10.5pt (use multiples of this size for pixel perfection)

The Zephiest of designs - a gaggle of Roman columns with gongs stacked on them.

Version 1.5

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A font made in the proto-calligraphic style I invented and used when I was a teenager circa 2001-2002. I haven't owned a nibbed pen since those days, so this font is as far as the style was ever allowed to evolve. It's somewhat lacking the handwritten character my writing had, but this regularity is the result I was trying to achieve. I had no particular use in mind for the style other than titling documents. For that reason I consider this to be a Headliner. 

"I" is kerned to itself so that it can be used to make nicer-looking Roman numerals.

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See also:Basalt Pixel

Alternate take on Nirvanite, this time with bullseyes rather than solid circles as the large segments.

This one is a lot more organic than its predecessor, but also a lot more confusing. Looks like clusters of alien tadpole eggs to me!

If this design is modified, it will break. But, it has been tested and seen to produce no graphical glitches.

A slightly chimeric sci-fi design with no relation to Space Blam, Space Clam, Space Cram, Space Dam, Space Fam, Space Flam, Space Gram, Space Ham, Space Jam, Space Kazaam, Space Ma'am, Space Pram, Space Ram, Space Sam, Space Slam, Space Spam, Space Tram, or Space Yam.

In making this I attempted to achieve a harmony between angles and curves. You can see it especially well on "B", "3", "8", and "&".

Recent updates: "J" improved, lowered "*" so it wouldn't touch the line above it, added several glyphs.

A medium-res pixel font I designed in 2017 for printing the text of "The Story of Book" (TSoB), a tale which began life as an imaginary joke story and then was actually committed to paper.

TSoB is woven from my and my friends' whims, flights of fancy, in-jokes, and intentional idiocy, as well as contributions from several AIs. The resulting story changes tone, style, mood, and context at seeming random, and is subversive toward its media and reader beyond insufferability. All this was done just to make Trap Farmer Brer Brah slightly more interesting to the very few people who will ever bother to get and read The Story of Book in-game. So this font is based on an Easter egg.

Experimental mosaic... or maybe a new mineral species?

This one started as a doodle. I began placing circles to see what kinds of complex shapes I could make, and this was the result.

It achieves a new visual effect at almost every size up to the original. Also try slowly moving the zoom slider for some interesting animations!

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This font is now nearly 1MB in size! I guess it has to do with the intrinsic complexity of circles.

Experimental 24-segment display or massive monochrome Mondrian matrix. Pixel compatible!

The thinking behind this one was that with incongruously sized segments arranged in the proper way, I would create a design which was effectively 5x5, but which accomodated more glyphs than 5x5 usually does. Negative space is incorporated into the structure of many glyphs, though not enough to classify this as an IVO design.

"Qualtron" is the name of an imaginary entity that a friend believed in - a being meant to represent the result of "a mathematical equation that can rule the universe". I didn't inquire further about it... :D

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Design Rules:

1. Segments can have interior length/width of 2 or 5.

2. The central 2x2 square must always remain open.

3. Square bricks and 90-degree angles only.

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Original size: 20.75pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)

Version 1.1

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A fusion of art deco- and Navajo-style design. Well, many civilizations used a square zigzag pattern such as this, but "Navajo" always comes first to mind when I look at this design.

The tilde is more ostentatious than the other diacritics because this is made for a Spanish-speaking friend!

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See also: Badwolf

Another of my many doodles. Fun to make!

Finally, a design where all the diacritics blend in and look natural!

Version 2.3

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15SEP2018: I have begun adding diacritics, but they must be made subtractively to fit into the design rules. I delete the diamonds around them which lends accented letters an open-topped appearance. This method is experimental but the result seems readable enough to me...

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Inspired by a comment by jonrgrover.

I built diamonds sized according to the Fibonacci series, then made a design out of them. The design was then carved away and modified to make the glyphs you see here. I used the members 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8. These sizes proved most feasible to work with in this sort of arrangement.

I gave the terminals a flared appearance which I think makes the glyphs look slightly Celtic. The design also makes me think of beach sand and things found on the beach - shells, pretty rocks, and so on.

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Not to be confused with "Diamondized".

An experiment in subtle asymmetry (it's most evident in the upper case).

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Version 1.7 (14Sep2018) - ExtL-A added, GFB completed, Greek started

Version 1.6 (18Aug2018) - Changed name from "RC Badwolf" to "Badwolf"

Version 1.5 (15Aug2018) - altered 2357,ð

Version 1.4 (14Aug2018) - altered space width and mw

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See also:Navajo Deco

A fusion between Roman-style text and pixel art - the sort of font that might have existed in old 80s font software. It's fairly wide and something of a colossus among pixel fonts, hence the name "Verbossus".

This is kerned, but not entirely. I plan for more language support so I don't yet know the entire list of combinations that will need kerning.

In publishing this I've now shared over 30,000 glyphs!

Original size: 13pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)

A 7x7 outline design which is made to form solid-looking masses from the glyphs while still allowing the outer perimeters of words to take on some unique shapes.

Original size: 5.25pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)

A design with long ascenders and descenders, even on letters that don't normally have them. Good for "old book" text in video games.

This is used in ESOSVM for most text which occurs while the player is in the dimension "Ladede", thus the name. Ladede has a canon, cosmology, and eventing which are seeded by in-jokes relating to roguelike games, especially Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. A font like this, in that context, is meant to be elegant but also mocking. This makes it seem subtly adversarial, as roguelike game elements are wont to do.

Version 1.4

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A variant of Kitchen Sink Rounded with filter sizes altered so that most letters are enclosed within golden rectangles. This is a squatter and friendlier take on the design - good for header text.

UC cloned to LC to make this easier to use...

A 117-segment display made to have a more "mosaic" look. Try using this one at odd sizes, especially with antialiasing off! The resulting distortions occur in a consistent way which leads to many new uses for the font.

Original size: 38pt

Version 1.5

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Experimental slab-serif. The added height from the serifs is quantized so that the serifs, rather than the normal lines, determine a glyph's geometry.

It reminds me of the Wild West and the old cartoon "The Jetsons" at the same time. It uses two kinds of serifs: normal slabs and "hangover" serifs. The hangovers are the ones that look like overhangs. Is there another name for them? I don't know.

This font is set to appear in several games at once! I'm not the developer of any of them! WOO

Despite what you may have heard, a "hoedown" is just a party.

Bookish pixel font designed for general reading. Made for use in my own future web designs.