Letters within letters! Type an uppercase letter followed by a lowercase letter to nest them. Type a period for an inner square, and > for an outer square.
This was an experiment from several years ago that I found half-finished while looking for potential CounterComp entries. I added missing letters and quite dramatically improved the existing ones. It's not perfect, and some combinations don't work so well (I'm particularly unhappy with capital I), but I think it turned out pretty well nonetheless.
Beware: for some reason, the downloaded font is huge-about 6 times the height of most other fonts-which makes it look horrible in e.g. MS Word, due to the pixel optimization at "small" sizes. I'm not sure what causes this, and consequentially, I don't know how to fix it.
Experimental 49-segment display.
In making and studying other segmented displays, I noticed they tended to have strong-looking right angled lines but weak-looking diagonals. This is my attempt to make a design where both styles of lines look more appealing and join together more solidly.
Version 1.5
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Experimental slab-serif. The added height from the serifs is quantized so that the serifs, rather than the normal lines, determine a glyph's geometry.
It reminds me of the Wild West and the old cartoon "The Jetsons" at the same time. It uses two kinds of serifs: normal slabs and "hangover" serifs. The hangovers are the ones that look like overhangs. Is there another name for them? I don't know.
This font is set to appear in several games at once! I'm not the developer of any of them! WOO
Despite what you may have heard, a "hoedown" is just a party.
I came up with an original high-res design, then brickswapped to turn everything into square bricks. The result sort of reminds me of Proxima Punch Pixel Squared, but less art deco and more computer-esque. It has a really old and naive look to it which could make it good for retro-terminal use.
"Buttons Foe" = "Obtuse Font". Not only is it an obtuse font in look and construction, it's reminescent of an era when computers were thought of as adversarial, magic voodoo boxes. So both the name and the anagram are equally applicable. :^)
A 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.
EXPERIMENTAL BLACKLETTER THING or EBT (codename "Chimera Spine") first came into AMFA custody on July 23, 2018. As of this time it is still considered to be non-dangerous. Study of EBT has proven that there is a relationship between its venomous barbs and English letter frequencies, with more common letters being especially likely to have these barbs. The venom itself, while not lethal to any known form of biological tissue, has [REDACTED] effects on the human psyche.
It's split horizontally. An uppercase letter one line above the same lowercase letter produces a full 5x10 letterform.
Unlike other fonts with similar ideas, this one is made in a nonstandardized way. Some letters can be extended beyond 2 lines of height without changing their structure and some can't. By experimenting with these forms one might discover new styles.
Despite what the preview shows, there is no line spacing at all.
"Tameshigiri" means "test cutting".
Original size: 4pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
A gnarled, pointy design which fits into many historical periods and aesthetics. It makes me think of Wild West woodtype and gargoyles.
I was making some new bricks to add to Brick Basket when the idea of a segmented display made from composites occurred to me. The result is this experimental 25-segment display.
This achieves some interesting "double line"/"folded line" effects. It also gets some pecuilar distortions at smaller sizes.
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.
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 form of alien mirror-Latin which the wizard Iacedrom used to summon mustard spirits. Looks like a forest which grew while subject to radiation poisoning.
If you make any ambigrams with this, I'd love to see them!
Pixelated demake of Nirvanite Fossil. It introduces more size variation than its predecessors, and proves even harder to read. The size variation was necessary to prevent these sprites from being too large and to make them more unique from the glyphs in Nirvanite Fossil.
Original size: 25pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
The Zephiest of designs - a gaggle of Roman columns with gongs stacked on them.
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 MegasharkAn experiment which attempts to harmonize soft curves and straight lines while eschewing angles. The result is this "inkflow" design. What is the opposite of an inktrap? I don't know, so I'm calling it inkflow.
This could also be viewed as a hybridization of neon-style lettering and normal sans serif... it is not quite made to be either one, but could act as a decent companion font to them. Most neon fonts need a larger size and are thus more suited to headers, while this design is well suited to body text.
This could also ALSO be considered a Hybrid because it works as both a pixel font and a high-res one.
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.
Stained-glass blackletter Frankenfont thing. :D
UC cloned to LC to make this easier to use...
This is a clone of Chimera SpineA 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...