My take on the Mongolian 'Phags-pa script designed by the Tibetan monk Phagspa in 1269, based on the Tibetan script, to write Mongolian, Tibetan, Sanskrit and Chinese. This font is based on the Tibetan style which consists almost entirely of straight lines and right angles. It seemed like a prime candidate for a FontStruct treatment. I've added rounded corners and serifs to make it more visually interesting.

The script is written in vertical columns top-to-bottom and left-to-right and thus needs to be rotated 90° clockwise and the columns then reversed.

'Phags-pa was added to the Unicode standard in version 5.0 in 2006. This font however uses an ad-hoc mapping to Ascii characters which admittedly doesn't always make sense. I kind of gave up in the end and started assigning a bunch of letters to digits. Letters are connected into syllable block by a thin line (mapped to '-'), usually on the right-hand side. A straight line clashed wth the serifs so I made it into a small arch.

The script is an abugida: the vowel ‹a› is inherent in each syllable and thus not written.

A dark look and a few crows' beaks for dreary November... it belongs to my "1st of" series for 2016.

While suffering some serious fonter's block, here's another "wonky" experiment: this time, based on my "21st Century Dot Matrix" font.  Random numbers were used to determine each dot's nudged position for the vertical (–½ / –¼ / 0 / +¼ / +½), and another set of random numbers for the horizontal.  Each position had an equal 20% chance of placement.

On the previous "wonky" font ("Wonky Pins"), I adjusted some dots manually to be more visually pleasing, but I refrained from doing that here.  Because so many dots were nudged to extreme positions (–½ & +½ vertically and horizontally) WITHOUT further adjustment, the printed text is still legible but definitely not as refined at "Wonky Pins"...

This typeface was also based on 2 sets of dots this time: one randomized set for an even number of dots across a row (6 or 8), and the other set for an odd number of dots (7).  Sometimes, even dots and odd dots are used together on the same row in order to match the placement in the original design.  These blocks are present in the "À" position.  A slightly larger generic block in position "Á" is only present to prevent word processors from 'cutting off' dots nudged too far vertically up or down; initial test printings resulted in ½ dots being printed at those extremes.

Perhaps another "wonky" experiment will place the extreme ends at a lower chance of occurance (perhaps 10%) while the other three (–¼ / 0 / +¼) more at likely at 26.67% each.  Or perhaps an even higher chance that the dot is not even nudged at all, with lower likelihoods as you move outwards to the extremes.  This might alleviate the need for any manual adjustments, yet still get the point across that something... something has gone wonky with the printer...

2Legs Before Wicket ... this was inspired by one of the spellbinding cricket matches this summer.

inspired by five by five pixel font