Dear FontStructors,
Thanks to all of you who have built, discussed, shared and downloaded on FontStruct this year. It’s been another fantastic year on the grid with the two competitions, “Inline” and “Game” as a couple of the biggest highlights.
A special end-of-year thanks to our main and founding sponsor FontShop who continued to support the site and keep our services free in 2014. FontShop have also already committed to keeping the bricks piled high through 2015. Thank you FontShop! In case you haven’t noticed, they launched their amazing next generation site this month. Even if you’re not looking to purchase a font right now, it’s a must-see if you have any interest in typography and design.
We’d also like to thank GlyphsApp who continue to sponsor support for the Glyphs export feature, allowing users to easily transfer their designs to the leading desktop font editor (Mac only). In Glyphs you can do the kind of detailed editing and tweaking of your fonts that FontStruct itself is not yet capable of.
As a small seasonal gift to FontStructors we’re releasing a new set of bricks today – a kind of fin/thorn shape which has been requested several times in the unofficial forum:
I’m looking forward to 2015 when we hope to gradually introduce more substantial improvements to the site and the editor.
Until then, Happy Holidays everyone!
Another fantastic competition draws to a celebratory close. Thanks to everyone who took part.
The standard of entries was, as always, extremely high, and the FontStructing community again flaunted their seemingly endless ingenuity and range of imagination. Some entries were genuinely playable as puzzles or games in themselves, while others were designed with real and complex game scenarios in mind. Never before have the FontStruction descriptions been as detailed and interesting as they were for this competition. The affinity between playful, puzzling minds and FontStructing is apparently a deep and intimate one.
The four judges, each asked to name their three favourites, came up with nine different winning candidates, as well as three runners-up. So it was a very close run thing with a great gaggle* of brick-laden runners dipping into the winning frame. (*Collective noun for FontStructors anyone?)
Fortunately there was one clear winner – both the “FontStructor’s Favourite” and a choice of a majority of the judges: Wrath of Mordor by Frodo7.
Indie game legend and guest judge Shaun Inman found the design “definitely evocative of its inspiration”. Frodo7 himself wrote:
This is my endeavour to make a spiky blackletter in Szpajdel’s black metal style that evokes the terror of Mordor at pixel level
You succeeded. Congratulations Frodo7!
The second prizewinning entry was the ingenious AT Sudoku by Zhalgas Kassymkulov which turned multiple, mind-bending puzzles into a well-designed and genuinely legible font (Sample shows the variation AT Sudoku+).
As Goatmeal wrote:
Add the requisite Latin squares to your printout, and you have 55 different games in a single typeface.
Congratulations Zhalgas!
Last but not least, the judges chose Stepwyze by geneus1 as a prizewinner. As so often in the past, geneus1 had several strong entries. Stepwyze won over a number of other high-quality platform/level oriented FontStructions with it’s mature design, attention to detail and integrated gaming concept:
Try not to stumble over your words as you go about your business and time flies by. Just like in real life.
To my great surprise and delight, I noticed while writing this, that geneus’s playable prototyped version of the game for this font exists already!
Congratulations geneus1!
There are really just too many fine entries to mention them all in this post, but here’s a selection of other FontStructions which caught the judges eye:
Shaun Inman enjoyed Buzz Wire by ben17. “Unexpected meatspace inspiration. Legibility suffers for its inventiveness but I’d still play with it in a pediatrician’s waiting room.”
There were surprisingly few picture/icon fonts but Pixel Spaceships by escaphandro – a complete two-layered spritesheet – missed out on a prize by a subpixel’s whisker.
The entries from four caught the attention of several of the judges and Level Rebel was second in the race for the FontStructor’s favorite crown. Goatmeal liked this one: “Simple yet highly effective. Would work great as a video game’s title screen or as the titles for each level.”. Shaun Inman also liked the unassuming but perfectly executed Retropixel (shown above)– “Marble meets LCD. Legible and handsome.”
En Word Puzzle by naveenchandru was also the subject of praise, Shaun Inman writing “Font as playable game. Like Neven Mrgan’s Blackbar distilled into a typeface.”
Try Again by minidonut, Click Pop Beads by Aeolian, Zogg Domination by funk_king, Ray Type Alpha by geneus1 and AT Tactica by architaraz all also appeared on the judges’ scorecards.
Congratulations to everyone. Thank you all for taking part in the competition and I’m looking forward to the next one.
Prizewinners will be contacted shortly regarding their prizes.
Thank you Judges!
All our brick are belong to you. It takes quite a while to have a proper look at 45 entries and samples. Many thanks to our expert guest judges for kindly spending time with us.
Shaun Inman is a designer, developer, and composer. His myriad of projects and presences is well worth a deep trawl. Shaun uses FontStruct in his game development work, for example in Retro Game Crunch!
Stephen Coles is an editor and typographer living in Oakland and Berlin. After six years at FontShop as a creative director, he now publishes Fonts In Use and Typographica, writes for type foundries, and consults with various organizations on typeface selection.
Goatmeal has been creating, recreating and sharing game fonts since the very early days of our site. You can read more about him here, or just go straight to his amazing archive.
