The last entry in the Pseudostencil series... this is built at 2x2!

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

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See also:Gridlarva

Based on the lettering seen on a Dutch poster from 1922 Which I think was originally designed by Dutch designer Bart van der Leck.

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

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

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

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".

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...

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!

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Some letters were recently reworked to make them more consistent with the others in height.

I made a blocky, industrial sort of style, then added art deco-style line width variation. Then, a couple of tech lines here, a couple of details there, and SHAZAM! We get these 1950's-era raygun-toting space race zippity zap letters. It's a font Marvin the Martian might use...

Original size: 7px (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)

Inspired by the letters found throughout Betondorp, Amsterdam!

An attempt to recreate the lettering seen on a early 1900's poster ad for "Van Nelle" coffee.

(Uppercase only!)

A piece of constructivism inspired by Dutch artistic movement "De Stijl".

A piece of constructivism inspired by Dutch artistic movement "De Stijl".

A piece of constructivism inspired by Dutch artistic movement "De Stijl".

Recap of the lettering seen on a old brochure by Wendingen for the  "Internationale Theater Tentoonstelling Amsterdam 1922"

The brochure and letters were designed by:

"Hendricus Theodorus Wijdeveld" (4 october 1885 – 20 februari 1987).

As usual I completed the alphabet, but (since its mainly a display typeface) this time I used the punctuations to store some glyphs meant to be used for drawing ornamental decorations as seen on the original brochure design.

Recap of the lettering for "Reis Journaal" by "Duco Perkens" aka "Charles Edgar du Perron" (usually E. du Perron).

A recap of the lettering by "Fre Cohen". And as additional supplement I attempted to complete the entire alphabet plus some punctuations.

In loving memory of the great Dutch graphical designer Frederika Sophia (Fré) Cohen(August 11, 1903 – June 14, 1943).

The 5x5 pixel font used for the Virtual Gremlin, an old emulator/game I wrote. The standard font for ingame text.

This font was also designed to work well with IRC clients and ASCII games (see sample).

Breaking the 5x5 grid was unfortunate but necessary in order to make legible characters in non-Latin languages.