I designed this 16x16 pixel font to facilitate texturing and dithering for pixel artists. Not every piece of art software has tools designed for texturing/dithering, and loading lots of custom brushes for the purpose can slow one's software way down as well. This font was made to attempt to solve these problems. Now you can dither, shade, and texture by typing! Every glyph repeats as a seamless texture both horizontally and vertically.
The name comes from my emulator/game, "Virtua Gremlin". Although these patterns weren't in the game (it used 9x9 tiles, not 16x16), many of the patterns here are based on that earlier work. "Skins" is a reference to graphical skins, of course. :D
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USAGE GUIDE
A-Z = textures
a-z = dithering/shading patterns
0-9 = scanlines
The rest is sort of a mishmash... I'll organize it better once I have enough glyphs to warrant a good classification system...
Have an idea for a pattern? Want to see a particular sprite or aesthetic included? Let me know :D
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Original size: 12pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
Tip: View this in the Character Map so you can more easily grab and paste glyphs when designing!
See also: Gremlin Skins HD
A tasty video breakfast with which to start your day. Based on the scanline font used by a certain YouTube series ;)
(Looks best when used with a negative line spacing, so that your lines appear as a continuous block of text.)
This is licensed Public Domain because it is based only on the glyphs "ACEFHILMNO". These were recreated exactingly for authenticity. All other glyphs are inventions, since to my knowledge only the aforementioned ones appear in this font within INFOCHAMMEL'S videos.
I saw this font was tweeted by INFOCHAMMEL recently. Glory be!
A 12x12 pixel font designed for use alongside microfonts, especially the "Derpberd" family it's modeled after. These large letters help decorate the start of a new chapter in a manner similar to the art fonts of illuminated manuscripts. I think this makes a decent "high-tech" or "board game" font, too! :D
Alternate style on lowercase (alternate ,.!? are on <>/~). The symbols and numerals have a slightly altered frame to help differentiate them and add some flavor.
11x11 version of Illuminated Flamingo. Made to achieve a hybrid look between Derpberd Condensed and Gremlin 3x6, allowing this to be used with a greater range of microfont styles.
This is a clone of Derpberd Illuminated 12x12Another experimental font for texturing work. This one uses only an 8x8 grid, but since it isn't pixel art, a much greater variety of patterns is possible. Every glyph in the font repeats as a seamless texture in both directions.
See also:Gremlin Skins (pixel version)
My attempt at a font which uses only one grid square per glyph. I guess this is the Fontstruct equivalent of pixel art...?
As an extra challenge I decided to use no curved bricks. (This rule was since broken to add © and ®).
Even better letterforms could be created by compositing the entire thing. However, the goal here was to do what I could with the existing bricks. As such, only #?![]{}¹²³ make use of composites.
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Welcome to Tridisaster. It's ALL TRIANGLES, ALL THE TIME. Welcome to Triangle Channel.
Mathematical operators have a distinctive "open" look to help set them apart. There are few exceptions (like ^) because these symbols are used in many non-math contexts.
The only one I'm not sure about at this point is the comma, which works fine for my purposes, but probably makes this font a pain for anyone who tries to read/write at length with it. XD
All Basic Latin is kerned for both cases! Use a mixed case to create weird alien scaffolding! Inverted ",." can be found on "µ¶".
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An attempt to make low-resolution, circled letters without the use of filters. Reminds me of branding irons or stencils. The name is based on a friend's joke about lost marbles. :^)
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TIP: This one looks best at smaller sizes (24pt or less) and with antialiasing/ClearType turned on!
Continuing on the theme of choosing a regular shape and making an alphabet out of it.
Looks best at smaller sizes (<24pt) and with antialiasing/ClearType turned on.
Can this be done better with filters? Probably, but I still have to learn those... :D
Yet another polygonal font, this time a diamond. :^)
This one was also designed to combine symmetry and asymmetry. Some letters have central lines and some have offset lines. In this way a greater variety of designs was made possible.
From various games written in my ESOS engine.
When Malil Ehnetahine wishes to speak, she calls up the wind to bring her Temper Tree leaves, which form the shapes of these letters.
This font is accurate to the ingame font and is finished.
A tear-off ticket design. I went for the slightly gaudy look which is associated with carnivals and arcades.
While making this I also got the idea for a font which looks like a 35mm reel with little scenes on each segment...
Original size: 14.25pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
This is a work in progress.
After making Ticketmeister, I got curious about the idea of 35mm film glyphs. I wanted to see how accurately the shape and proportions of the film could be recreated with Fontstruct bricks. I used a 1px = 1 square = 1mm conversion, and think I've nailed the original film look. It's symmetrical, so one glyph in isolation will look as if it were spliced out.
"Space" lacks borders, so it can be used to show a continuous reel - useful for enlarging and making imagery with.
A star font which combines a pixelated look with halftone shading.
It needs some form of antialiasing to be legible at small sizes. (See sample below or try the Pixel views). At larger sizes, you can use it with or without antialiasing!
Original size: 12pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
Recreation of a font from "Proxima", a 2000 public-domain homebrew SHMUP game by Alan Obee for Game Boy Color. This font is used on the title screen and high-score screens (though the high-score version is built of tiles and looks much more detailed).
.#$!? are inventions - not present in the original font, but useful nonetheless.
Finally, an All Stars that is truly "all" "stars" HAHAHA GEDDIT
This is a clone of All Stars BlackA multi-line design which is slightly reminescent of mazes/fingerprints. It's not designed to create functional mazes, but it is somewhat capable!
"Absinthelyric Print" is an anagram for "Labyrinthine Script".
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Original size: 11.25pt. Use multiples of this value for pixel perfection. (If you use antialiasing, it will look perfect at most any size.)
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Design rules:
1. Square bricks and 90-degree angles only.
2. Alphabetic glyphs must have open terminals; numerals and symbols must have closed terminals. Letters which do not terminate (D,O, etc.) must be broken so that they terminate.
3. Glyphs must fill the 15x15 grid.
4. Ligatures and combinatorial glyphs must fit into one letter's space.
5. Draw from the outside in.
Bold variant of Ticketmeister.
Original size: 14.25pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
This is a clone of TicketmeisterA cipher/code used by the Kibble Cabal, a mostly animal-based team of misfits and food thieves in the game Trap Farmer Brer Brah. This code is very similar in application to the "Hobo Code" from the United States in the late 1800s. It makes a pretty good cipher, as well!
Original size: 8pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
A font which appears in "Defender/Joust" (1995) on Game Boy. This font is complete within the ROM, so only the original characters are included.
This font is used for Defender's menus and gameplay.
The placement of glyphs within the individual 8x8 tiles suggests that this font is meant to be monospaced. I've squinted at this one long enough... it looks right to me! :D
The "gremoji" symbols used in Virtual Gremlin. These are spoken to the player by those Gremlins who are not intelligent enough to form words, and can be used to guage the Gremlins' moods.
Original size: 21pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
An attempt to produce a low-resolution pixel font which generates mazes from arbitrary strings of text. It requires the use of negative line spacing (available only to certain software) to look right without hand-editing.
The mazes it produces aren't the best, but they are definitely interesting! I might just call this a cipher and be done with it...
3x3 cipher, based on version 0.3 of "Micromaze". It uses its own form of binary notation for the numerals, wherein the upper-right 4 pixels play the role of the 1, 2, 4, and 8.
This is the smallest font in which I was able to give a unique symbol to every glyph (excluding the lower/upper case, which look the same). It reads sort of like Pigpen Cipher, but is more densely written.
Since MMC is obscure and of constant width/height, it serves many "gibberish" and "placeholder text" purposes in addition to being a modestly strong cipher.
Original size: 2pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
Fontstruct's first vacuum tube font!
This is a design inspired by Nixie tubes. Since these "tubes" are iconographic, they could theoretically represent 12AX7s, 6L6s, KT88s, or whatever tube/valve you wanted. Feel free to clone and build on this concept.
A chimera (fusion) which combines inline-versus-outline, maze, Gemscript, and other techniques to produce a timeless look.
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Original size: 6.75pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
Design Rules:
1. Square bricks only.
2. A 1px soft border of negative space must exist between lines whenever possible.
3. Glyphs must fill the 9x9 grid to the greatest extent possible given the rounded style.
4. The set of glyphs shall be a heterogeneous mix of symmetrical and asymmetrical forms.
5. Negative space will replace positive in any situation wherein the small grid size or the geometry of a letterform would be detrimental to the chosen style. This includes all situations where any shape lacks at least a soft 1px border of negative space around it.
See also: Terran Pixelcruiser
- NOTES -
Use lower case to get Modern Gryzildan and UPPER CASE for Royal Gryzildan. Hold Shift while typing numerals/symbols to get the Royal ones.
These scripts do not canonically appear together on any in-universe writing. Gryzil writing is always written entirely in one script or the other. But, feel free to use this as you wish.
- DESCRIPTION -
This font contains two scripts of the Gryzil, Brer Brah's people, who are from various video games and stories of mine. Gryzil are a sapient bear-people that live on/near beaches in the continent of Skina on planet Fyromr. They have dull greenish fur, can speak, read, write and use tools, walk bipedally, and have beer fermentation chambers for stomachs. They appear in ESOS, Trap Farmer Brer Brah, and Anime Girls vs. The Cavemen.
The written language of these creatures is designed to be without subtlety. Most of the subtlety of Gryzil communication is gestural. For instance, quotations do not exist in Gryzil writing. There can be a record that someone said something, but only when a Gryzil who heard it firsthand speaks of it is there understood to be a quotation - the rest is simply hearsay.
This font is made as an attempt to anglicize the Gryzildan language - not to write it natively. Hence, it has some resemblance to Latin. But in fact these symbols all represent different gestures as well as different rasping, stamping, growling, and ingressive sounds which are unknown within Earth humans' formalized language studies. Nonetheless, you can write authentic Gryzildan with this. Read the Chalcedony-Bound Manual found in any of the games in which Gryzildan is used.
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Original size: 5.25pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
Fictional aliens' attempt at the Latin alphabet. The sticks and stems are repelled from the open parts of the letters. The result looks sort of like a hybrid of Latin and Korean!
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Original size: 8.25pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
Design rules:
- 11x11 grid.
- Square bricks only.
- 90° angles only.
- 100% constant height.
- Forms must fill grid space as much as possible without becoming unrecognizeable.