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

Another experimental "claw" font. 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.

A font in which only right turns are allowed. Where lines would be forced to turn left, they are segmented instead.

Even when these glyphs are flipped or transformed, they remain able to be drawn via right angles only!

An attempt to make a Calculatrix with both squares and hexagonal segments. The result doesn't really fit in with the others, but it has a harsh and highly technical appearance about it which I like.

More glyphs later, maybe?

Logotype made by request for a friend.

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!

Another of Dr. Zeph's* mad experiments! This is an Alien Latin Groovy Minimalist Thingamabob with numerous unique forms of dyslexia-inducing ambiguity.

* not a real doctor 

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 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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I wondered what a plain version of Candylander would look like, so I made this. :D

More glyphs soon!

Experimental font made with the new half-arc bricks. It reminds me of striped candy, but also looks like tape reels or gaskets for some strange machinery!

Experimental font made with the new pizza slice brick. :D

No filters, just nudging!

An inverted alternate version of Spiderling that's glitch-free... for now, at least!

I think this doesn't look nearly as spider-like as the original... your mileage may vary...

Original size: 15pt

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A font which has a stemless, 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. This font is designed to be 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, and so this font is designed to minimize the loss of legibility.

So far, the design 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. In other words, I'm trying to make 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. Then, I can isolate more of the principles involved and start making more interesting designs using them.

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.

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08OCT2018: Due to the perceived lack of interest in this project, I'm shelving it til a later date. The font has already performed extremely well in tests so I don't think it can be substantially improved, only expanded.

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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.

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

A design that looks like a top-down view of ziggurats!

I composited the diacritics so they'd fit into place, but this means that anything non-English needs to be pretty large to be unambiguously read...

Stained-glass blackletter Frankenfont thing. :D

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

Experimental 25-segment display with some interesting geometry. :D

SPOOKY GHOST FONT. A work in progress. Getting the right spooky apparition look is pretty intensive, but I managed to finish the basic character set before Halloween. :D

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This started as a 5x5 design. After realizing S and Z would look far better if I made them 1 square taller, I converted the whole font to be roughly 5x6. At this low resolution, it's hard to get the degree of irregularity which I think makes these letters look ghostly... but, the idea is certainly present!

This design seems like it'd fit in with a lot of horror and science fiction stuff, too. Apart from the "smoky"/"ghostly" look, it has a "melted" one which suggests a hot place or maybe immersion in acid. It also looks a bit like slime, and finally at smaller sizes it has a glitch-esque appearance.

An experiment. More glyphs to come...

A chimera made from art deco, barcode, and circuitry elements. It only employs angles where they are needed to differentiate glyphs.

When I look at this, I think "robot skeleton".

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.

A playful typeface inspired by Wim Crouwel's 1968 Stedelijk poster!

Experimental effects font. To me it looks like pins, hot air balloons, weird trees, icecreams, map points, and more!

Zapotec-style mosaic/segmented display. :D

(Use _ for the full design.)

Megashark's hard 1px outline was experimentally converted to a soft 1px outline. This result is far less readable to my eye, though it does look cool! Its printed words have a balloon-esque, almost organic quality.

"S.D.M.G." stands for "Super Dolphin Machine Gun", a weapon from the game Terraria. The Minishark and Megashark are from the same game. :^)

A minimized Minishark. How does that make it Mega? Well it's MEGA COOL.

I think this is the first 5x5 connected-outline design on FS!

An experiment to see if 3x3 fonts are more legible when drawn in negative space. I consider this to be not only a success, but also the most readable 3x3 design I have seen - particularly the uppercase.

The successors Megashark and S.D.M.G. are more useable and more stylish respectively, while Minishark strikes a good balance. 

This is considered an E3x3 because, while it's created in a 5x5 grid, it has an effective drawing area of only 3x3. The outermost square only has pixels drawn in it when the interior design dictates such.

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

Pixelated demake of Nirvanite Fossil. It introduces more size variation than its predecessors, and proves even harder to read. The size variation was necessary to prevent these sprites from being too large and to make them more unique from the glyphs in Nirvanite Fossil.

Original size: 25pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)

A form of alien mirror-Latin which the wizard Iacedrom used to summon mustard spirits. Looks like a forest which grew while subject to radiation poisoning.

If you make any ambigrams with this, I'd love to see them!

Experimental multiline design.

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 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.