I am working on a small presentation about pixel typefaces and I am trying to list notable type design projects on this particular topic.
I realized how few typefaces I know in this category and thought the people at TypeDrawers would probably think of obvious projects that I had somehow missed.
So far I have listed:
Retail typefaces:
• Lo-Res (by Zuzana Licko)
• FF ThreeSix (Paul McNeil and Hamish Muir)
• Elementar (by Gustavo Ferreira)
• Bitcount (by Petr van Blokland)
• the work of SelfBuild type foundry
Custom typefaces for a particular use:
• Chicago bitmap (by Susan Kare)
• Girouette (by Jean-François Porchez)
• the work of Toshi Omagari for Arcade Game Typography
Related project:
• the FontStruct project
Thanks for reading and thanks in advance for your ideas.
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Ruffa Computer Gothic by Gregory Ruffa 1971
Steve by Vince Whitlock 1973 (PDF link)
Others by Zuzana Licko : Emperor, Emigre, Oakland
Speaking of Alan Birch: Bitmax & Synchro are certainly notable.
I have also realized since a few years (this research confirms it to me) what a significant proportion of typefaces "disappear", are no longer available a few years or decades after their creation (but this is a quite different topic).
Also dig the old Beagle Bros programs Shape Mechanic and Font Mechanic for the Apple //e and //c.
• a webpage where you can play with a variable version of Elementar:
https://hipertipo.gitlab.io/elementar2/navigator/
• some photographs of the original drawings of Zuzana Licko Lo-Res:
https://twitter.com/ANRT_type/status/936399628412637184
Thanks again
20 years ago I developed automatic tests for the Debian installer, booting in a virtual machine and reading the screen with a simple OCR. There where 4 different fonts used.
I have a collection of bitmapped fonts in different sizes and formats. Smallest is 3x3. Width 6 x height 8 is good readable for Latin-1. Other popular formats are 16x12 and 16x32.
Formats range from literal definition in code, all characters in a small PNG to TTF.
https://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/apple2.shtml
https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
I also released a pixel font family last year that's loosely based on the old 8x8 pixel fonts used in Atari and Nintendo games.
https://github.com/justinpenner/player-sans-mono
And I highly recommend Toshi's book on video game typography as others have mentioned!
Closer shot from the video:
I did a google and saw an old forum thread that said that MS DOS does not have any fonts as part of the OS but uses the bitmap font stored in the hardwares ROM. Maybe this system just has a funky one that somehow allows these overlaps?