Experimental sliced sans serif. My goal here was to make a design which would result in an extremely compact and durable physical stencil. If any readers end up constructing this stencil, I'd love to see it! I don't own any CNC tech myself...

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Version History

1.3 - added More Latin and Google Fonts Basic bands.

1.2 - added uppercase, changed name to "Aegris Stencil".

1.1 - edited for more readability at small size. Glyphs with enclosed loops were altered so that the "movement" of the segments always runs clockwise.

1.0 - released.

A font made for a friend's board game!

This gives me a strong "film credits" feeling with its high impact and simple geometry. 

An attempt at Gridbug in 2x2!

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

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See also:Gridlarva

Experimental doodle. The idea here was to make letters, ascenders/descenders, and diacritics obey the same ratios. The result looks sci-fi and sporty at the same time...

Version 1.2

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A slightly futuristic and stencilesque design using halfwidth bricks.

The idea here was to make every glyph simple and minimal, not only in terms of geometry but line connections as well. Some glyphs are still more complex/less minimal than others, but I think it's a good amount of variety.

Another of Dr. Zeph's* mad experiments! This is an Alien Latin Groovy Minimalist Thingamabob with numerous unique forms of dyslexia-inducing ambiguity. It reads surprisingly well at small size!

* = not a real doctor 

An extension of ideas present in "Gehenna".

A seriously spurless sans-serif. It approaches minimalism, but doesn't quite get there. This gives it a look that lets it blend in with lots of things!

It reminds me of a font I saw years ago on some futuristic-looking tinned rations. I don't remember what the brand was, but I remember the label having a very rounded sans-serif font like this one.

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See also:2K4S

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.

A half-sized, filterless version of Comicool Unicase which also has square terminals.

This has lowercase, but is made for all-caps comic book style lettering, so consider the lowercase as something added for accessibility's sake...

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 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

A variant of Clockwork Macguffin in which most curves are changed to 90° angles. Whereas with most fonts a change like this would result in a more authoritarian or "professional" look, this one became quirkier. I like it!

Version 1.1

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A semibold Gongclonker made to the same specs as the original - 5x5 with no wasted matrix.

An experiment which attempts to harmonize soft curves and straight lines while eschewing angles. The result is this "inkflow" design. What is the opposite of an inktrap? I don't know, so I'm calling it inkflow.

This could also be viewed as a hybridization of neon-style lettering and normal sans serif... it is not quite made to be either one, but could act as a decent companion font to them. Most neon fonts need a larger size and are thus more suited to headers, while this design is well suited to body text.

This could also ALSO be considered a Hybrid because it works as both a pixel font and a high-res one.

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.

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

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, and helps let the players know that they are in a bad, screwed-up place that they are unlikely to understand.