Stylized 5x5 pixel font. Tiny but power-packed!
I designed it to have a slightly balloon-esque, oldschool arcade look. Feel free to use it in your games.
*
Original size: 7.5pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
Continuing on the theme of overzealously antialiased pixel fonts, here's a 3x5 no-wasted-matrix design. The shading enabled me to make many glyphs which normally need to be truncated or compressed (MWaemswz@«©»®, etc). Looks best at 2x Pixel size!
This gives me an "old newspaper" feeling and seems like the kind of font that would be used for the text of such newspapers in old adventure games.
Unfortunately, I could not get the shading effect to work in any graphics software except by turning antialiasing on, and this ruins the look. So if you want to render text in this font, I recommend going to View -> User Input, typing your text here on this page, and then screen capturing it...
A mostly-4x5 design made for legibility, aesthetics, and an almost authoritarian regularity. This makes it suited for comics, tutorials, general reading, and more. It can be easily read at its original size with the same effort it would take to read a high-res design of the same size.
This design has been tested and reported to make an excellent font for IRC and other chat clients!
*
Original size: 4.5pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
An even smaller and more stylized take on Madcat/Madkitten. It isn't really a Decolike anymore, but it is readable at smaller sizes than almost all my other designs!
This uses some compression/truncation tricks to fit glyphs into a smaller grid. Those tricks are usually used in pixel designs (such as Chlorophyte) but I think they worked out well here, too!
This is a cloneVersion 1.5
*
3x3 slab serif. This is based on Wallerton, Anachronistic Gunslinger, an IRC-based "TV show" which I used to write and produce. All the characters in the show were my AIs pretending they were cowboys.
Well, I managed to successfully produce a lowercase for this one!
Recommended: Use with kerning.
Another attempt at the challenging 4x4 grid. Only those characters which I could fit into the 4x4 grid were included. This time, I think I managed to get near the level of quality and style typical of a 5x5 font!
This is probably the smallest font most people would ever want to use for general reading. It took no trivial amount of experience and experimentation to come up with!
If you use this to make assets, you can use color separation to fit 4 glyphs onto an 8x8 tile or 16 onto a 16x16 tile. Check out my profile page for more microfonts you can use in your games!
Original size: 3pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
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.
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. :^)
This is a clone of MegasharkSuper-tiny! This begins to approach the lower limits of visual interpretability. It's still far more readable than any 3x3 pixel font I've yet seen, though.
Like Four on the Floor, this font uses every trick I have picked up as a pixel artist and font artist to make itself as readable as possible. I consider this one suitable for general reading (e.g. when making pixel art tutorials or depicting book texts in pixel games), but only just.
Original size: 3pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
Squareish, slightly futuristic 2x2 design. It's made to fit in with industrial, sci-fi, and Soviet-style aesthetics. It's also far more internally consistent than my other 2x2 designs!
Because this uses so much nudging, diacritics will be impossible unless I composite many of the existing glyphs or place the diacritics really high... I'll think about it...
A tiny font made for pixel art tutorials and streamer use. The inspiration comes from old art of video game controllers which I used to make, in particular the letters ABCLRXYZ which I drew many times on many controller buttons. The more complex letters (B,E,M,W) take on slightly abstract forms for neatness' sake.
Since these glyphs are all 4x4 unicase, compositing them for use in Fontstruct tutorials might save you a lot of work. Feel free to clone this for such a use.
Original size: 3pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
See also: Four on the Floor, Glyphstamp 1x1
A rounded version of Pixelcruiser Flagship. I think rounding it off both made it better-looking and more readable! This now looks like something I'd use in pixel comics.
This is a clone of Pixelcruiser FlagshipA 3x3 microfont from the Virtual Gremlin, an old game of mine. This is designed to look tiny and indistinct. Useful when writing jargon, placeholder text, or technobabble (the kind of meaningless information you'd write when drawing a newspaper or computer terminal).
VERSION HISTORY:
08 Feb 2018 - v1.0 declared finished.
A little pixel font made with zero experience in less than 15 minutes. Enjoy.
If you think it could help you, I tried to put it under the most liberal license so you can freely use it or edit it for your personal and commercial projects. Don't feel the need to credit me.
Also see my "pixel joy" for a better but slightly bigger pixel font.
This is my attempt to make the smallest possible font. Each character fits inside a 3x3 pixel square (4x4 pixels if you include the space between characters). This font can be useful where pixel space is at a premium, like on an LED matrix or a mechanical display.
I don't consider this a truly complete font because there is no distinction between the capital letters and small letters. Also, some of the special characters can be difficult to descern without context. Nevertheless, this font can create readable text strings and convey information using a minimum of resources.
I am publishing this font under a Creative Commons license, so that anyone can use it for any purpose. Attribution is appreciated but not required.
Leave a comment if you make something cool with it!
James Robert Patrick IV
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 tiny but surprisingly legible 4x5 pixel font originally designed for a "code golf" competition. Includes all printable ASCII characters (with identical lowercase and uppercase letters). This version has proportional spacing, so not all characters have the same width.
A tiny but surprisingly legible 4x5 pixel font originally designed for a "code golf" competition. Includes all printable ASCII characters (with identical lowercase and uppercase letters). This is the monospace version of the font.
This is a clone of CG pixel 4x5