A pixel font which combines four experimental techniques at once:
1. Structurally disconnecting the stems from the open parts of letters.
2. Allowing glyphs to extend beyond the reaches of width and starting position.
3. Designing glyphs specifically to connect and form new shapes, rather than simply allowing shapes to emerge from existing characteristics.
4. Designing glyphs so that the overall font is free of a need for kerning.
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Alternates are now on UPPER CASE. I'll continue to update this as I get more ideas!
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Original size: 6.75pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
A pixel font made to look like fire! Now you can answer (and ask!) your burning questions...
Drawing and editing these takes more time and effort than most other forms of pixel art. Don't expect them to look perfect without some time and effort from YOU, as well. An effect like this requires hand adjustment of every part at every stage.
The coloring, infill color, and effects you use with this font make a drastic difference as to what looks are evoked by its shapes! Scroll down for lots of examples. :^)
Alternates on lowercase!
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TODO: Alternates for .,?!@_*#$%&()+/:;<=>[\]^`[|]~†123456890
Original size: 18pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
I decided to make a design which incorporated the thinnest/lightest weight lines possible in FontStruct. This is the result; I'll add more if people like it.
These 1/32 lines cannot be accurately nudged, so a unique line has to be built for each vertical position where I want a line. These lines also cannot be centered on a place where two curves meet (such as the middle of B or R). This introduces some unintentional asymmetry to the design, but I like it, so I'll keep it.
There is also the problem that forming a diagonal line of the same line weight is nearly impossible. While angled 1/32 lines can be formed, their angles are all close to 0. No method exists for making a line which slants at 45 degrees while also being 1/32 weight. So, I had to make some thicker lines in certain areas. I don't think they detract from the design, but if you scrutinize this enough, you'll notice them.
Alternate take on Nirvanite, this time with bullseyes rather than solid circles as the large segments.
This one is a lot more organic than its predecessor, but also a lot more confusing. Looks like clusters of alien tadpole eggs to me!
This is a clone of NirvaniteA double-line style with a twist. Named for the Exage Viral Armada (EVA), a mutagenic virus featured in several of my own games and stories. EVA causes rapid limb bifurcation and the spontaneous generation of butterflies, both of which can be seen in various glyphs from this design.
The exact rules for this are somewhat complicated, and based on structural as well as visual analysis. The basic idea can be seen on glyphs like k and x: Closed loops (double line) are joined by single lines which turn back on themselves to create the illusion of more lines. Of course, this idea had to be modified for most of the other glyphs, for the sake of stylistic consistency and visual interest. Particularly, almost all the spurred glyphs have the double-line structures open up to form the spurs.
This is a cloneA hexagon shape, a forced perspective effect, and a typeface all had their DNA extracted and recombined by evil scientists at Salk Institute. "Chimera Scales" is a hexagonal blackletter and the culmination of 8 years of genomic research. It has the ability to look like itself no matter what environment it's in. ALSO IT EATS HUMAN SOULS.
Version 1.3: Added Polish.
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This font used to be a normal Decolike... until someone decided to chow down on it! They seemed to prefer the taste of spurs, as all of them have been bitten off, leaving only semicircular impressions.
"Nervousa" is an anagram for "Ravenous".
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".
SPOOKY GHOST FONT. A work in progress. Getting the right spooky apparition look is pretty intensive, but I managed to finish the basic character set before Halloween. :D
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This started as a 5x5 design. After realizing S and Z would look far better if I made them 1 square taller, I converted the whole font to be roughly 5x6. At this low resolution, it's hard to get the degree of irregularity which I think makes these letters look ghostly... but, the idea is certainly present!
This design seems like it'd fit in with a lot of horror and science fiction stuff, too. Apart from the "smoky"/"ghostly" look, it has a "melted" one which suggests a hot place or maybe immersion in acid. It also looks a bit like slime, and finally at smaller sizes it has a glitch-esque appearance.
An extension of ideas present in "Gehenna".
A multi-outline design with intentional aliasing.
At the original size, it looks nicely textured. The illusions become more harsh as one zooms in.
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Original size: 12.75pt (use multiples of this size for pixel perfection)
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Welcome to Tridisaster. It's ALL TRIANGLES, ALL THE TIME. Welcome to Triangle Channel.
Mathematical operators have a distinctive "open" look to help set them apart. There are few exceptions (like ^) because these symbols are used in many non-math contexts.
The only one I'm not sure about at this point is the comma, which works fine for my purposes, but probably makes this font a pain for anyone who tries to read/write at length with it. XD
All Basic Latin is kerned for both cases! Use a mixed case to create weird alien scaffolding! Inverted ",." can be found on "µ¶".
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Experimental mosaic... or maybe a new mineral species?
This one started as a doodle. I began placing circles to see what kinds of complex shapes I could make, and this was the result.
It achieves a new visual effect at almost every size up to the original. Also try slowly moving the zoom slider for some interesting animations!
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This font is now nearly 1MB in size! I guess it has to do with the intrinsic complexity of circles.
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 attempt to produce a low-resolution pixel font which generates mazes from arbitrary strings of text. It requires the use of negative line spacing (available only to certain software) to look right without hand-editing.
The mazes it produces aren't the best, but they are definitely interesting! I might just call this a cipher and be done with it...
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
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)
A quirky Pseudostencil design with a central horizontal slot going through it. The "slot" is 1 brick tall for lowercase and 2 for uppercase, and becomes a vertical slot for numerals and certain symbols.
This is named for the cowboy and lasagna emojis. These were repeatedly added to then removed from several popular chat clients and websites. Changing emoji standardization or government conspiracy? YOU DECIDE.
Iteration 4: Basic Latin kerning finished.
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DOODLE DOODLE DOODLE!
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Design Rules:
1. Letters with spurs will have the spur begin at the baseline. This provides the distinctive "high heeled" look.
2. Any letter whose traditional design has a straight vertical line on its left side will keep the line, no matter how the lines of the actual letter travel.
A gnarled, pointy design which fits into many historical periods and aesthetics. It makes me think of Wild West woodtype and gargoyles.
A 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.