A vaguely Courierlike OSD (Onscreen Display) font which tries its best to be casual. The name is inspired by the old computer joke: "Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?"
No filters or faux-beziers, just stock bricks and a bit of stacking/nudging!
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More about the design:
It started as a doodle and an attempt to make a smooth, low-resolution, low-poly font, and then it became a Courierlike. I have other fonts that tried to do polygonal round shapes before this (such as Cartoon Riot) but this design is my first real success in this area.
Initially, I made the angled glyphs before the round ones. I didn't want to change the angled ones, so glyphs like C, O, and Q became a bit wider than they are tall. I'm quite fond of this, because in most designs these glyphs tend to have a tall and narrow character. I think the mildly squat look of this font makes it cuter and gives it more personality.
A lot of glyphs were altered in specific ways to look more like metal type, especially anything with diacritics which touch the letters themselves. Other glyphs were altered specifically to be interpretable at small size. I also use angled contours and actual round bricks alongside each other within the same glyphs, another technique which is geared toward style and interpretability at small size.
This font came with many new challenges and an array of new techniques had to be designed. Loops were an insurmountable challenge because of the low resolution and heavy line weight, so I drew rounded areas to suggest them. You can see it on letters like Greek γ, ζ, and ξ.
V0.2.6: Finished Cyrillic.
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A small scale faux-bezier design with a cutout-esque look. It offers different advantages at different sizes. Most glyphs are legible down to 4pt.
As this design evolves, it gives me an increasing "board games" feeling. This design seems very well-suited for board game parts, especially cards and smaller plastic pieces.
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This has a few notable design features:
- Asymmetry helps keep letters like bdpq from being confused for one another
- Serifs and flags accomplish the same thing for groups of similar letters such as ce and ftſ
- Semiserif style helps reduce the need for kerning to almost zero
- Simplified polygons and counter shapes help pixel optimization
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See also:Cartoon Riot
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 NirvaniteExperimental 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.
A stencil design in which diagonal cuts are used to imply angles and curves. It does not quite obey the rules of a segmented display, but it tries its best!
This is inspired by some text I put on the side of the Sheepslayer Mk.2, a flying dragon car piloted by Lyll "Hatch" Soretti in my game Seven Candles.
Experimental 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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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.
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!
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)
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.
The Zephiest of designs - a gaggle of Roman columns with gongs stacked on them.
Version 1.1
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A fusion of art deco- and Navajo-style design. Well, many civilizations used a square zigzag pattern such as this, but "Navajo" always comes first to mind when I look at this design.
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See also: Badwolf
An avantgarde serif with a mild horror theme. It takes advantage of the properties of antialiasing/text smoothing algorithms to render a convincingly handmade aesthetic.
Making attractive, consistent, nonpixel serif designs at this grid size is quite a challenge. Making them look handmade is even moreso. I've tried that many times, but this design is the first such one I felt was truly usable. It doesn't quite look typewriter-esque, but blends well with other designs that are.
For this I used many different serif shapes, with each one depending on how the line it was attached to wanted to bend or terminate. This is in contrast to most other serif designs I've seen, in which the serifs themselves are more consistent in shape. I decided against faux-bezier curves for this, because they all looked way too polygonal. I think this is one of few cases where a rectangular O and S enhance the overall design rather than weakening it.
An experimental design using 1/8 weight lines alongside 1/16 ones. The 1/8 lines are the smallest that can be accurately nudged. Centering them is still a problem at times, and I need a few impossible composites to perfect the glyphs ABEFHKQRXYijkx34789, but overall I'm quite fond of how this doodle turned out.
I think I could use some intensive compositing to get rid of the central dividing line in glyphs like A and H. I'll give it a try when I can.
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)
The new Eyeball Kids™ from Pixel Kitchen® are the best way to get your child interested in experimenting with eyeballs. Color 'em! Italicize 'em! Throw 'em into oncoming traffic! Abuse 'em all you want because EYEBALL KIDS ARE ETERNAL.*
! ! ! DO NOT FEED EYEBALL KIDS AFTER MIDNIGHT ! ! !
* - Eternal under normal use conditions. See the enclosed manual for terms.
An alternate take on Eyeball Kids which has more expressive eyes.
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Making this has given me an idea for an ASCII Roguelike tileset wherein lowercase letters represent juvenile creatures and uppercase letters represent adult ones.
This is a clone of Eyeball KidsA 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...
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...