A design that looks like a top-down view of ziggurats!
I composited the diacritics so they'd fit into place, but this means that most anything non-English needs to be pretty large to be unambiguously read...
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
An inverted alternate version of Spiderling that's glitch-free... for now, at least!
I think this doesn't look nearly as spider-like as the original... your mileage may vary...
The first of a kind - an experimental font made with the new pizza slice brick. :D
Somehow it makes me think of jukeboxes, particularly letters like "A" and "O" which have the same sort of "mosaic lighting" look which many jukeboxes have.
No filters, just nudging!
I wondered what a plain version of Candylander would look like, so I made this. :D
I think a fully half-arc version could look even more stylish than this! Hope to find time to create one soon. (EDIT: Done, see Migrator)
This is a clone of CandylanderExperimental brush/pen thing. Has a slightly spooky look. Because of their tapering curves, many glyphs can render with a "split" or "stencil" look about them. This is due to software-imposed limitations on vector rendering. Designs which share this property can be considered Pseudostencils.
This design is not informed or inspired by any existing typographical traditions. I set out to make the "claw" bricks (as I call them) into a font and this is the result.
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An extension of ideas present in "Gehenna".
Another of Dr. Zeph's* mad experiments! This is an Alien Latin Groovy Minimalist Thingamabob with numerous unique forms of dyslexia-inducing ambiguity. It reads surprisingly well at small size!
* = not a real doctor
Iterated version of an unreleased design called "Midnight Oil". It's also slightly related to Dethzmezenger and Gehenna.
I went against a few of my own conventions for this one. The close spacing might look a bit strange at times, but it eliminates the need for kerning while also creating a unique look. The overlapping spurs make me think of thorny plants!
This is an original design, but it does make me think of Planescape: Torment when I look at it, thus the name!
An attempt to make a Calculatrix with both squares and hexagonal segments. The result doesn't really fit in with the others, but it has a harsh and highly technical appearance about it which I like.
More glyphs later, maybe?
A font in which only right turns are allowed. Where lines would be forced to turn left, they are segmented instead.
Even when these glyphs are flipped or transformed, they remain able to be drawn via right turns only!
Rather than serve an ornamental or decorative purpose, this one is made to be as clean as possible so that it works well for body text. It's highly legible at small size, so it could potentially even be a programmer's font!
"Goud" stands for "Garden of Unearthly Delights", the name of an album from the band Cathedral.
An ornate Goud with lots o' thorns! Now with MORE THORNS.
This is a clone of GoudA font made to the height of the visible field when the FontStructor is zoomed all the way out on my screen. I've always wanted to make something that vaguely pushed one of FS' limits - in this case, the height of the field which I can observe without scrolling.
Well, I could've made this even taller, but I wanted it to be somewhat useable at least. :D
This was originally a pixel design, but then I changed my mind and converted it to high-res. That gave it a more architectural look.
An evil electromagnetic zigzag tape reel. Looks almost embossed, as if the letters were "pressed" into the waves somehow. In that way it reminds me of old hand-operated label makers. It also makes me think of electricity, TV static, ocean waves, tire tracks, fractured glass, and more depending on font size and color.
The name is inspired by an attack from a notorious NES game, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde".
A dashed line design made with the new half-arc bricks. The emphasized spurs/stems and off-kilter geometry give it a quirky, almost handwritten quality. Its striped appearance makes me think of candy as well as the Cheshire Cat, thus the name. :D
I doubt the upper case would look as cute as the lower. So I've cloned all LC to UC to make this easier to use...
A font which evokes a feeling of roving warbands. It looks a bit Wild West, too! It started as one of those blackletter designs with diamond-shaped terminals, but then I experimented on it and now we have this.
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.
Version 1.2
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A slightly futuristic and stencilesque design using halfwidth bricks.
The idea here was to make every glyph simple and minimal, not only in terms of overall geometry but individual line connections as well. Some glyphs are still more complex/less minimal than others, but I think it's a good amount of variety.
Iteration 1.11
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Tribal doodle thing. Still in its experimental phase. It's named for Abraxas, a Tromp from the PC game "Commander Blood". (As it turns out, the same name has many historical and mythological uses.)
Version 1.1: Began changing the counter shapes of all glyphs in order to enhance the font's appearance.
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Experimental doodle. The idea here was to make letters, ascenders/descenders, and diacritics obey the same ratios. The result looks sci-fi and sporty at the same time... a bit strange, but also a bit useful!
Experimental sliced sans serif. My goal here was to make a design which would result in an extremely compact and durable physical stencil. Almost all of the sharp points and acute angles are within the negative space, so it should be easy and very safe to make, handle and work with this stencil.
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Version History
1.3 - added More Latin and Google Fonts Basic bands.
1.2 - added uppercase, changed name to "Aegris Stencil".
1.1 - edited for more readability at small size. Glyphs with enclosed loops were altered so that the "movement" of the segments always runs clockwise.
1.0 - released.
Experimental 5x3 font. This went through quite a few iterations! The result is surprisingly readable, but still not quite something I'd want to use as a chat font.
In making this I did my best to avoid compression and truncation, trying instead to use the interpretation of light as my guide. Many glyphs don't look much at all like what they represent, but as my eye glides over them, they make sense and I read them without issue.
A spirally design which tries its best to be lineal. Check out the "M" to see the "ammonyte". :D
Well, for some time I've wanted to make a font entirely with spirals. This is not that font, but it's as close as I've gotten to actually carrying out the idea. This is also small enough to use for body text, which is likely more than will be able to be said about an actual 100% spiral font.
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Original size: 15.75pt (use multiples of this size 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...