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
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 cloneA really tiny font which uses only about 15/64 of a brick per glyph. This could have been even smaller, of course, but I wanted it to be readable, so I used 3x5 forms. This means I can do a 3x4 lowercase later if people want it.
Is there any practical use for this? Probably not. But, at the original size, the entire Lorem Ipsum text takes up about half of one line, so that's something. :D
This is a basic font for building words, each letter is one block made of a 3x5 composite, somtimes with stacking. Wish this were not a clone, since it is a root clonable from which clones can be made. Some letters need nudging when building words: Nudge left: filt, Nudge right: mvw. The numbers need to be nudged down. The lower case letters are designed to not touch either the top or the bottom of the edge of the brick (except the g).
This is a clone of DungeoneerContinuing 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 compressed, squareish microfont. 4x4, monospaced, no wasted matrix.
I like how this one uses all the space it occupies. Glyphs like ijl1 fill out the words they're in rather than creating voids. Also, i looks kind of like a lit candlestick, and I like that.
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Original size: 3pt (use multiples of this size for pixel perfection)
An experimental logotype and another attempt to create a distinctive design in 2x2. Some words look better than others... it's best for 1-2 word phrases rather than body text.
"B", "P", and "R" are compromise designs... no satisfactory way exists to create their curves while maintaining the optimal line width, so their counters were filled a bit to give them the same sense of solidity as the other letters.
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A "denghon" is a giant, many-limbed, extradimensional creature found throughout my games, especially ESOS.
Is it Ironic that I spent a lot of time making a minimalistic font? Maybe not...
In any case, this is a font I made with a challenge of keeping every character within a 5x5 block size (4x4 blocks for the lowercase letters)
The only character NOT within a 5x5 square is the @ character. It somehow ended up a little wide.
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...
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 MegasharkAn 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.