designed with as much 1x1 space and as little 2x2 space as possible

edit 4/22/2026: OMG THX FOR THE STAFF PICK

some letters arent very legible, feel free to comment suggestions or improvements for it

Plum Blossom (V2)

Version 2 update: Tiles are now in 3D isometric view

My only entry for the Fontstruct Color competition, consisting of 38 tile designs for the Chinese game of Mahjong (+ tile back).

I underestimated how big of an undertaking this was going to be, but luckily I managed to curb my perfectionism and get most of the tiles done with designs I'm satisfied with. The Chinese characters were traced from images on Wikimedia Commons (1, 2) and then modified to fit my taste, the space on the tile, even out stroke width and so on. Hopefully they turned out looking good and legible, as I'm not at all familiar with the system. The rest of the designs were freehanded.

The font is named (for now) after my favorite of the designs - the plum Flower Tile, one of the last I drew. (mapped to 'w')

Character Mapping

This font uses two mappings for each of the tiles, to the following Unicode character sets:

Mahjong Tiles (U+1F000 ... U+1F02F)

All tiles are represented except for the four Season Tiles and Joker (U+1F026 ... U+1F02A)

Basic Latin

Coins suit: a to i

Bamboo suit: A to I

Charaters suit: 1 to 9

Dragons: | (Red) 0 (White) # (Green)

Winds: ^ (N) v (S) > (E) < (W)

Flowers: w (Plum) x (Orchid) y (Chrysanthemum) z (Bamboo)

Tile Back: *

Possible Future Updates

I'll probably be taking a break from Fontstruct for a while, but some ideas for future improvements could be:

- Change name

- Add four Season tiles

- Add Joker

- Redesign 1 Bamboo tile (Current one based on a design from this article. It was easiest to replicate but doesn't really fit the rest of the set)

- Add character mapping to Chinese chars.

- [DONE] 3D Isometric view of the tiles

Extra Links

"How Do I Know if my Mahjong Set is Complete?" from mahjongtreasures.com was helpful.

Also this YouTube video from Accented Cinema provided an interesting look into the culture surrounding the game.

Thanks for reading. Feedback will be appreciated!

Manufaktur

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The cyanotype was developed in 1842 by Sir John Herschel. This process, commonly used for blueprints, involved placing an object onto a surface and covering it in a solution of Iron (III) salts. Once the solution is exposed to ultraviolet light, the Iron (III) salts are converted into Iron (II) salts. After exposure, the suface is washed and the water reacts with the Iron (II) salts to form a Prussian Blue pigment that blueprints are known for.

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Manufaktur is a monospaced typeface and while it has upper and lower case letters, it is really unicase. Manufaktur is intentionally stripped of most characters, coming with only the most essential. The idea being that Manufaktur has the bare minimum, but is still functional as a typface. It was designed with the intentions to be used in a machine shop more than on a page.

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Notes:

Manufaktur is set in #002c8c, as a reference to blueprints. I had wanted to use Pantone's Prussian Blue (#003153) but it was too dark. 

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Some of the stenil lines (C, J, O, Q, U, 0, and 2) were made using white bricks. I had experimented ways to get the stencil lines without using white bricks, but it looked much cleaner with them. Being a color font, you should be able to change the color of the white bricks to mach your background. It's not ideal, but it's what looked the best.

A font designed after those jigsaw foam mats you see in nurseries, sometimes with removable letters or numbers.

Fun fact: these colors were picked from the Fontsructor UI!

Based on old vector display text, mainly on what's seen in The Andromeda Strain (1971). Alternative D/K/V in the capitals.

This turned into a whole series when all I was trying to do was simple 3×3 oversized pixel font. One tiny modification to try and fit some glyph into the established structure led other glyphs to conform to the modification. As a general practice, every time I make a modification to a completed glyph, I make a copy of it first. When enough glyphs were conformed to a/the modification, I moved them off to a clone.*

While working on the clone, some new tiny modification would generate glyphs that were similar but enough different that it warranted it's own clone. And so on...so much that the naming scheme had to be changed a few times as well.

And the series is not even all that good. But once an idea hits...and the FontStruction is easy to do... it might as well be "completed".  There are 9 versions of tmADHDs at varying states of completion at the time of first sharing.

*​​This is an over-simplification of the process. What actually happened was that the first iteration ended up with what looked like three similar-yet-distinct styles so I made two clones of the first and deleted glyphs of the first style from the second and moved glyphs to uppercase of the ones that seemed to belong to the second style and added new glyphs to flesh out the style. Did the same for the third. Lots of back and forth between the three iterations to ensure none were left behind or inadvertently deleted. Still there were enough individual glyphs left that I didn't know what to do with. Then I created a fourth clone and moved the left-overs to it. Which later turned to fifth and sixth clone. At some point the thought occurred that tmADHD2 doesn't need to be as wide so it became tmADHD2a and the narrower iteration became tmADHD2b. And so on.

A basic sans serif font for coding, meant for small sizes (and it would look good in large sizes too, if it weren't for those pesky parentheses...)

An odd dot matrix

"Clean" forms in lowercase

Thanks for the top pick! :D

A nonogram font. Some variation between uppercase/lowercase letters, alternative 2/7 on < >, and an extra Y on ^. I originally made this in a 5x5 grid, but there were too many glyphs with multiple solutions, so I had to remake the whole thing. (You can still see the original style in the small numbers)

Every printable character in the strict 7-bit ASCII set, with handy decimal, octal and binary numerical codes attached (no hexadcimal, as it involves letters ;-)

Height 3 / Width 2 / Filters Ø 

My note: db Monuck is NOT a color font. When creating the font, I had created different versions in different layers, which can no longer be deleted.  Now, despite everything, the note "Color Font" appears, although it is not.

Please can someone help me to solve the problem? 
—
Many thanks for your help, the problem has been solved. ☼ 
—

Republished with Latin accents and a few new symbols. 17.04.24

Αναδημοσίευση με τη Δημοτική (εργασία σε εξέλιξη). 23.05.24

Various glyph refinements, Latin as well as Greek,  17.06.24

Some alternates in lower case and filled counter glyphs also included.

Third font in a series of three colour pixel experiments, made after reading Arcade Game Typography: The Art of Pixel Type by Toshi Omagari. This one has a double shadow, which gives an extruded 3D effect at a smaller scale.

Feeling inspired after reading Arcade Game Typography: The Art of Pixel Type by Toshi Omagari, I set out to make my own 8x8 pixel font. I worked with a similar approach to the one I used in the larger grid font offstruct rgb.

First started in Adobe Illustrator, each character consists of three iterations of the same 6x6 pixel letter: in RGB Red, Green and Blue. These were layered, offset by one pixel diagonally, filling the 8x8 box. To achieve additive blending, I applied the "Lighten" transparancy setting. Combinations of overlaying these three primary RGB colours result in the secondary RGB coloured pixels Yellow, Cyan and Magenta. In the additive mixing of coloured lights, the equal blending of all three primary colours results in White. All pixels were then entered manually into the fontstructor and black pixels were added for display purposes.

Republished with some accents, diacritics, etc. Likely still in progress (as if anything is ever really finished.)  Cheers,

12.07.24 

Several glyph refinements:

Latin-  5  

Greek- Lower Case   bita, gamma, ita, ksi.

01.08.24

Substantial refinements: curved horizontal termini, greater articulation at intersections.

Nothing Phone font inspired

See more:

https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/2470916/bubbly-black-c

https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/2142870/dover-led-v2-4

https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/151519/ledpop_b

https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1406099/nanopixel

https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/2147398/pixel-sans-13-63

https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/2564059/font-8368

first try: Raw and complex font; have fun!

a monospaced geometric font for coding

One of my older ideas. A font where you can basically change the colors to get a different nation (this one is Belgium) that uses vertical triband flag. Not sure if I should publish every country one-by-one though. What do you think?

Twenty unique glyphs

Twenty by twenty grid

An All-caps font on a 20x20 grid. Some alternates are in the Telugu block.

A bold, rounded, mono spaced typeface;  useful at various scales, I think.  Designed primarily for use in English,  also useful in French and Spanish.  It's functionality in Greek is limitted, only really useful in a display context, or where only Demotic usage is required; not useful in Katharevousa, Koine, Classical, etc.  Open Font Liscence, hope it is enjoyable and of use.

An outline version of Blueback, with slightly different proportions, x-height: 2⅛ bricks.