Original size: 15pt
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A font which has a spurless, sans-serif, pixelated polygonal look which is somewhat reminescent of fonts used in VHS technology.
A lot of applied science went into this design. It's designed to remain legible on all media in all use conditions, provided that one uses the original size or a multiple thereof. Numerous technologies and mediums were employed to realize this objective.
"Diaspora" was 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 and voxel 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 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 of 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.
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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.
1.0.7 - Some spacing values changed to increase internal consistency. More difficult tests are being devised. However, since only I seem interested in this type of work, this project is going on hiatus for some time.
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See also: AMFA, a font built with similar considerations in mind
While walking through Glitch Forest, you spot a sudden movement behind the Sprite Trees. It's [EVIL_ANGATONIST]! With a twisted smile, s/he/it converts your words into text written in this font. ZOUNDS! How will you get through summer school now?
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This was made to reproduce an amusing glitch found in MIDAS which caused insanely high ratings of 17.3×10^213 (17.3 septuagintillion). The glitch has since been fixed.
A semi-hollow pattern fill version of Graphene. Made for a friend.
This is a clone of Graphene BlackVersion 0.2: Improved all glyphs, added More Latin, changed name to "Letsago".
TODO: Make line widths more consistent, especially on numerals.
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A friendly, but slightly obtuse font. I think these polygons are the smallest and simplest ones which can be made with stock FS bricks and used to create glyphs with a truly circular appearance. This only works up to a certain size before the look reverts to that of a polygonal sans-serif, but it works very well up to that point!
This is the culmination of knowledge gained from several other experiments, such as Marginalia. It should be very difficult to make a smoother font from this at the same grid size while still using stock FS bricks.
Some kerning is done, but the majority of it will be done once every glyph is considered to be perfected. For now, you can use vector software (like Inkscape) to manually kern pairs.
A design that combines tropes from fantasy, sci-fi, and sports in a subtle and pixel-optimized way.
Structurally, this looks like a high-res version of Marengi Mk2. There are still plenty of differences between the two, but since they seem equally readable to me, I'm tagging this as a chat font.
Version 1.5: All permutations of E and F were refined and improved.
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A modernized, rounded, and truncated version of Marengi. This is made to be a good text editor/chat font. It has very few kerning pairs, so it should render fine in any software.
Ascenders are only allowed to be as tall as the uppercase/numerals, while descenders are allowed to go 2px below the line. This creates a natural line spacing that is readable and not too dense. (Diacritics break this rule, of course... darn them...)
Gone are the curved descenders/termini on letters like gjty. The simpler geometry makes this design more suited to speedreading than its predecessor. In fact, altering those four letters alone improves speedreading on this font by up to 14%!
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09JUN2019: I have been using this as my main IRC/chat font for some time now. Of all my chatfont designs, this has proven the easiest to read and use.
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MIV: 8.31
Original size: 6pt (use multiples of this size for pixel perfection)
Version 1.1: Narrowed the numerals and uppercase letters by 1/2 brick.
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Font made for the card text in War of the Knockoffs II. Highly legible down to about 7pt.
This is a compromise design in many ways due to the small grid size... it may be iterated more...
This is a cloneI designed this 16x16 pixel font to facilitate texturing and dithering for pixel artists. Not every piece of art software has tools designed for texturing/dithering, and loading lots of custom brushes for the purpose can slow one's software way down as well. This font was made to attempt to solve these problems. Now you can dither, shade, and texture by typing! Every glyph repeats as a seamless texture both horizontally and vertically.
The name comes from my emulator/game, "Virtua Gremlin". Although these patterns weren't in the game (it used 9x9 tiles, not 16x16), many of the patterns here are based on that earlier work. "Skins" is a reference to graphical skins, of course. :D
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USAGE GUIDE
A-Z = textures
a-z = dithering/shading patterns
0-9 = scanlines
The rest is sort of a mishmash... I'll organize it better once I have enough glyphs to warrant a good classification system...
Have an idea for a pattern? Want to see a particular sprite or aesthetic included? Let me know :D
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Original size: 12pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
Tip: View this in the Character Map so you can more easily grab and paste glyphs when designing!
See also: Gremlin Skins HD
The main font used by MARENGI Omnisystems in my video game series, "Endless Sea Of Stars". These letterforms can be found engraved into or projected onto practically every piece of MO technology. This script was designed in 2011 to be suitable for printing, logo design, art, and many other purposes. It lacks the constant height which most of my other pixel fonts have, but makes up for it with its bookish appearance.
Unfortunately, replicating the exact design of the antialiased version of this font is impossible, not only on FontStruct, but on all software other than ESOSVM. This is because ESOSVM uses a custom renderer which makes use of proprietary techniques. Marengi HD comes close, but not very.
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Versioning:
2.6 (19Aug2018) - "bdďđ" were perfected. Space width reduced.
2.5 (20Jul2018) - "IÌÍÎÏø" were perfected and massive kerning work began.
2.4 (15Jul2018) - "J" was perfected and several letterwidths were altered.
2.3 (18May2018) - "hnru34679ÀÁÂÃÅÈÉÊÌÍÎÏÑÒÓÔÕØÙÚÛÝÞßàáâãåæçèéêìíîïñòóôõøùúûý" were perfected.
2.2 (17May2018) - ":;gjty%/\ÂÆÊÎÔÛâæêîôû¼½¾" were edited for more consistency and readability.
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MIV: 8.74
Original size: 11pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
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Official font of AMFA (formerly ATMA), the main rival of MARENGI Omnisystems in Endless Sea Of Stars. Appears throughout my games (especially those using the ESOS and ESOS-Lite engines) and is used as the main font of ESOS Terminal A (the one doing the super-long survey).
Between 2012 and 2014, ESOS Journey-Depth AI entities collaborated to produce this specific arrangement of pixels as the most legible form of 1px wide, monochrome 8x8 Latin for electro-optical systems (Marinan Interpretability Value 9.29).
This font is useful if you want to write some really efficient text recognition software for a robot with a camera, or if you want a pixel font which elicits a high degree of reading accuracy. Some would argue that the uppercase makes it less readable, but you'll be hard pressed to find another font that is THIS readable in uppercase only!
This is a cloneA slightly large, bookish chatfont made for a friend. Bold version.
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Original size: 8.25pt (use multiples of this size for pixel perfection)
This is a clone of MotormouthA font which uses some custom macaroni bricks. This one has the same kind of structural asymmetry as Phenomenologist. Angles and corners on the left are almost always sharper than those on the right, which gives glyphs a structural asymmetry as well as a sense of rightward momentum. This technique also imparts variation to some otherwise very similar letterforms (bdpq, mw, sz).
This is named for a species of android from Doctor Who.
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Other design decisions:
- Make the ascender height shorter than the uppercase
- Use squares for dots/diaresis and circles for punctuation, so that they are more quickly distinguished
- Allow the sharp curve and gentle curve to swap positions when it's beneficial to the glyph (BX8&)
- Incorporate angled lines into several glyphs so that none of the glyphs which have them seem out of place (SZsz012569*~$)
- Ignore the other design decisions for glyphs which need a standardized look due to their use in programming and other syntax-based forms of writing (most symbols & punctuation)
A terminal font used in several of my own games. Think of it as my own replacement font for a DOS prompt. It is meant for all-uppercase terminal use and does not have extended language support.
This design has been further refined since its initial Fontstruction. I have improved its aesthetics as well as its visual interpretability using Marinanian methods. This is still a design with more functionality than aesthetic appeal, though.
Original size: 3.75pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
See also:Amalgarmada, Amalgarmada 2
An attempt to make an esoteric form of Latin which is governed by the same amount and extent of structural logic as normal Latin. In other words, Latin that is weird, but makes sense while being as readable to the initiated as normal Latin is. It's a design that is weird in order to make itself easier to read, not harder.
This is a borderline IVO design, not because of its appearance, but because it sometimes requires the same set of visual considerations to interpret.