I 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
A bricks experiment in which the bricks are made of bricks. (Yo Dawg.) The name comes from a Duck Game map created by my amazing friend, Star. It seemed fitting. :^)
Original proportions are reached at sizes that are multiples of 21pt! Use 21pt, 42pt, etc. to get them.
Best with antialiasing turned off, although you can do smooth stone, gel, or gem-like looks with different antialiasing modes in your graphics software.
A tear-off ticket design. I went for the slightly gaudy look which is associated with carnivals and arcades.
While making this I also got the idea for a font which looks like a 35mm reel with little scenes on each segment...
Original size: 14.25pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
Balloon/block style pixel text.
Original size: 18.5pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
A variant of "GP Cannon" which attempts to take advantage of antialiasing methods which are used on it. The "skeleton" of each letter hides under the scanlines, causing effects ranging from motion blur to a wet-marker look. It works as both a pixel font and a high-resolution font!
It gives me strong "Atari ST" vibes...
This is a clone of GP CannonPossibly the last entry in the Derpberd family: A font which looks like the original Derpberd at pixel size, gets fuzzy at larger sizes, and finally reveals its racing-esque checkerboard pattern once you've enlarged it enough.
Original size: 5pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
This is a clone of DerpberdA multi-line design which is slightly reminescent of mazes/fingerprints. It's not designed to create functional mazes, but it is somewhat capable!
"Absinthelyric Print" is an anagram for "Labyrinthine Script".
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Original size: 11.25pt. Use multiples of this value for pixel perfection. (If you use antialiasing, it will look perfect at most any size.)
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Design rules:
1. Square bricks and 90-degree angles only.
2. Alphabetic glyphs must have open terminals; numerals and symbols must have closed terminals. Letters which do not terminate (D,O, etc.) must be broken so that they terminate.
3. Glyphs must fill the 15x15 grid.
4. Ligatures and combinatorial glyphs must fit into one letter's space.
5. Draw from the outside in.
Bold variant of Ticketmeister.
Original size: 14.25pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
This is a clone of TicketmeisterA design made to have long legs. The mild optical illusion this font creates was a happy coincidence!
I changed the name to "Taller Tales" since it seems that many fonts called "Tall Tales" actually exist...
Original size: 40pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection, or use in combination with antialiasing)
I attempted a blackletter style without any knowledge or references. The result reminds me of a vampire's writing!
The name "Dethzmezenger / Death's Messenger" comes from one of many old joke bands which I created.
Original size: 17.25pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
Another experiment. I made a grid out of the pinwheel shapes, then started drawing on it. Not sure why the bugged glyph count... hope nothing goes wrong...
Try viewing at 2x Pixel size to see how it is intended to look!
Type one of `|\^[] then a letter to texture the background as well!
Type _ to create the blank pattern between letters.
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Original size: 51pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
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Design Rules:
1. Alphabetic glyphs must fill the pinwheel grid space as much as possible.
2. The pinwheels must not touch any letter's perimeter line. Nor must they deviate from their formation, except when being deleted to make room for the perimeter lines.
3. 90-degree angles only.
87.10 degree slanted font for Italicized italic italic Ultra-Italic italic Italian italics. Thanks for making me design a whole family of fonts that hurt my eyes, Zuloph. :P
After I made RC Vertigo, Zu said he could still read it. I began to create increasingly slanted designs, and this one was finally the one he couldn't read.
No symbols/numerals for this one. I consider it to be machine-readable only at this point...
"Mythical Bursts" is an anagram of "Bismuth Crystal". The design is inspired by said crystals as well as Mayan/Aztec carvings (or at least, the comparatively simple forms they have in popular media) and sgraffito art in which a surface is scratched off to reveal a contrasting material underneath.
12SEP2018: I've edited every glyph in order to disconnect the letterforms from their enclosing shapes. This makes the font much more readable and consistent.
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Original size: 42pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
A font made by request for a certain Augmented Reality Game.
It is a functional blueprint - not meant to be used as-is, but designed to be embellished. Color it in, put effects on it, or whatever else you want. In this way the font can remystify itself and achieve distinctive looks which require particular art techniques to reach.
Recreation of a design from 2011. This was used for the logo and certain menu text in my most treasured and popular video game, "Seven Candles", so it was designed to write only a few words - Seven, Candles, Save, Lines, etc.
This will eventually be used in the remake as well, once I get around to that...
This is a logotype, so it only has a few letters in it. No more glyphs are planned.
The main text font used for the laptop variant of the Mega Duck game console, a device that usually came in a form very reminescent of a Game Boy. I discovered this device and font through Ashens' YouTube video on the Mega Duck.
I like the font's vaguely Art Deco stylings, so I'm preserving it here.
Note that since I don't own a Mega Duck myself, I am unable to see every glyph. I had to come up with a few myself. They're consistent to the style but may not reflect the look of the actual hardware. The system does seem to have excellent language support so I hope a Mega Duck owner sees this...
Also inconsistent to the actual font is the spacing. The original looks like Monospaced 8px, but the width of "0" makes this impractical.
Finally, bear in mind that each "pixel" on the Mega Duck had lines of separation between itself and its neighbors. I've changed the brick size to 0.8 in an attempt to simulate this. It takes an immense size to accurately reproduce the grid, so I consider this design to be in the High Resolution Pixel category.
Self-symmetrical/fractal pixel font. (x=2*Spx,y=5)
This is designed on 7x7 black boxes which act as superpixels. This ensures that inline and outline components are congruent.
Original size: 26pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
Based on ideas by zephram and Se7enty-Se7en, taking it one level deeper.
This is a clone of AmalgarmadaSelf-symmetrical pixel fractal font. (x=3*Spx,y=25)
Hit the Pixel button for the best preview.
- ITERATIONS -
x=1 - ESOS Lite Terminal
x=2 - Amalgarmada
x=3 - Amalgarmada 2 & Fractal 2 by jonrgrover
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Original size: 131pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
This is a clone of AmalgarmadaA fusion between Roman-style text and pixel art - the sort of font that might have existed in old 80s font software. It's fairly wide and verbose and is something of a colossus among pixel fonts.
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Original size: 13pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
Experimental 24-segment display or massive monochrome Mondrian matrix. Pixel compatible!
The thinking behind this one was that with incongruously sized segments arranged in the proper way, I would create a design which was effectively 5x5, but which accomodated more glyphs than 5x5 usually does. Negative space is incorporated into the structure of many glyphs, though not enough to classify this as an IVO design.
"Qualtron" is the name of an imaginary entity that a friend believed in - a being meant to represent the result of "a mathematical equation that can rule the universe". I didn't inquire further about it... :D
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Design Rules:
1. Segments can have interior length/width of 2 or 5.
2. The central 2x2 square must always remain open.
3. Square bricks and 90-degree angles only.
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Original size: 20.75pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
A pixel font which uses diagonal arrangements only, resulting in several optical illusions at once! It can appear to have solid lines, gradients, polka-dots, and more.
The negative spaces within the glyphs are as few as possible, to facilitate coloring them in. A few of them ("V", "W", "7", "^" etc.) are a bit arduous... I recommend zooming way in while coloring 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)
Experimental cyberpunk robot mosaic thing.
It gives me a strong "system font" feeling and seems like something that might be included with the OS of some futuristic tech deck. If the Fairlight Excalibur from Shadowrun Returns had its own font, this could be it!
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Original size: 21pt (use multiples of this size for pixel perfection)