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
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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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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)
A 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.
Derived from Chisato by Zephram.
Copyright 2019 Zephram & Doug Peters (https://www.Doug-Peters.com or https://Dougs.Work) of Symbiotic Design (https://www.SymbioticDesign.com).
Although Zephram's work is no longer apparent here, it exists in the underlying compressed letter forms and shapes of most of the characters that inspired me to give it a twist and make it monspaced with tapered ends.
Donations are super-appreciated. Credit for my contribution to this work IS also greatly appreciated.
Type: Monospaced Sans.
I guess I would classify this one as: Casual, Condensed.
Weight: Regular.
Web font: Yes.
Commercial use: Yes!
Derivatives: You betcha.
Redistribution: Anywhere.
P.S.:
Font-Journal (Freeware fonts for designers):
https://www.Font-Journal.com
Heavy Duty Web Hosting (Genuine cloud web hosting solution):
https://HDWebHosting.com
Domain Name registration:
https://www.DomainHostmaster.com (Wild West Domain Registry)
https://www.Domainance.com (Directi's 'Public Domain Registry')
Fonts and graphics blog:
https://Worthful.com
PayPal donations (to encourage my continued freeware font design efforts):
https://paypal.me/sitedesigner
Oh yeah, I design logos, websites, graphics, ads, marketing campaigns, PCs, and just about anything, really. -DP
This is a clone of ChisatoYet 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.
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.
Version 2.6
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Inspired by a comment by jonrgrover.
I built diamonds sized according to the Fibonacci series, then made a segmented display out of them. The design was then carved away 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.
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)
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...
An experiment to see how good of a hex grid I could make with just the hex brick. Answer: Pretty good!
(Use _ for the blank grid.)
This is capable of some pretty convincing "TV static" type effects, too!
87.10 degree slanted font for Italicized italic italic Ultra-Italic italic Italian italics. Thanks for making me design a whole family of fonts that hurt my eyes, Zuloph. :P
After I made RC Vertigo, Zu said he could still read it. I began to create increasingly slanted designs, and this one was finally the one he couldn't read.
No symbols/numerals for this one. I consider it to be machine-readable only at this point...
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.
Another 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)
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)
"Mythical Bursts" is an anagram of "Bismuth Crystal". The design is inspired by said crystals as well as Mayan/Aztec carvings (or at least, the comparatively simple forms they have in popular media) and sgraffito art in which a surface is scratched off to reveal a contrasting material underneath.
12SEP2018: I've edited every glyph in order to disconnect the letterforms from their enclosing shapes. This makes the font much more readable and consistent.
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Original size: 42pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
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.
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)
A 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 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.
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
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.
Experimental 49-segment display.
In making and studying other segmented displays, I noticed they tended to have strong-looking right angled lines but weak-looking diagonals. This is my attempt to make a design where both styles of lines look more appealing and join together more solidly.
A spirally design which tries its best to be lineal. Check out the "M" to see the "ammonyte". :D
Well, for some time I've wanted to make a font entirely with spirals. This is not that font, but it's as close as I've gotten to actually carrying out the idea. This is also small enough to use for body text, which is likely more than will be able to be said about an actual 100% spiral font.
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Original size: 15.75pt (use multiples of this size for pixel perfection)
Version 1.1: All 144 glyphs accounted for, changed to monospaced.
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A style of writing based on Orcish architecture, culture, and mythology. The main design rule was "no diagonals".
The name is inspired by Beogh, god of orcs in the Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup video game.
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Original size: 6.75pt (use multiples of this size for pixel perfection)
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!
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)