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[droqen]

I really like tiny fonts!

That said, I realized recently that there's a whole world of creativity possible even within the tiny space that is a 6x6 pixel square (or smaller).

I'd be interested in hearing what people have to say about pixel fonts in general; it's not a topic I find discussed much!


I find that it can be really tough to make the letter X look interesting on such a small scale. M and W are tough if you get too small, but are a cinch otherwise. How do you decide between a rounded O or a rectangular O? (or something even different, like a more diagonal O)

Here are some little fonts I made. (#2 has two versions; not upper/lowercase)
Click for x1 size


a little bit of commentary:
1. I was just screwing around with the theme of thicker horizontal lines, in 4x7. A few letters turned out... badly.
2. Went to 5x5, and made a number of fairly simple letters. I decided to see if I could add a few gaps and oddities. Created an alternate, more basic version.
3. Thicker vertical lines in 6x5. I love how this one turned out. My first crack at a 'wide' font.
4. Tiny (but not the tiniest possible) 3x4 font, fairly legible.
5. 5x(4+1); I played with a pixel row below the baseline for this one, only using it in some cases. I like how it turned out, though the Y is a bit off.
6. Decided to make a more spacious font, 6x6 (not even because it's number six, honest) with only straight lines and corners. If you'll notice, the vertical line and horizontal line through the middle are always in the same place. I broke my "corners" rule for X, and twisted it with B, D, and V. Also, the R is awkward but I think I did a good job adhering to the "rules"

I find that the first letters come easily, and I define the 'rules' for the font within them. I should try to create a font in a different order to see what the results are.

These are all of uniform sizes, too, just because they're easier to work with (when implementing them), I find. Also it adds to font uniformity and in some cases challenge. (share yours?)

[squidkid]

I like the die/domino thing. That's super clever.

[droqen]

thanks ^^ I was originally trying out numbers, but I couldn't decide on a font that would work, and then I tried roman numerals but they looked ick...

Long story short is I love dice <3

[Danrul]

I had the most fun with my 3x3 font.  Tiny sizes are quite fun.

[lnsine]

This thread got me in the mood for a tiny font!(5x5)
I have not seen many tiny fonts exploring foreign characters though, so I took the challenge:



ABCDEFG
HIJKLMN
OPQRSTU
VWXYZÆØ
Å
VÆR SÅ SNILL

The only problem I had was the å, I had to tuck it under the actual A, which may or may not be readily accepted.
Otherwise the A looked too flat! 

[kometbomb]

This Prof. Perlin's experiment may be of interest. Probably useful for copyright messages and other stuff that needs to be readable but you don't actually have to read.

Also, here's my 7x6 effort for anyone to use (almost) freely. It has a dark shadow so it's readable on varied backgrounds.

[laserghost]

This Prof. Perlin's experiment

That's interesting. I don't quite understand the explanation of using an LCD screen's RGBRGB colors to create it, however. Is it like an anti-aliasing trick?

[dbb]

This Prof. Perlin's experiment

That's interesting. I don't quite understand the explanation of using an LCD screen's RGBRGB colors to create it, however. Is it like an anti-aliasing trick?

Yes. Because the RGB elements of a single pixel are side-by-side, by varying the hue of a pixel you're also varying the position of the illuminated part of the pixel. Because the sub-pixel elements are always in the same order (RGB) you can use this to add detail to text at a sub-pixel level. I did have a white-on-black 3x3 pixel font that I'd done as an experiment using this technique, but I can't find it now and it wasn't all that good anyway.

[powly]

I once wanted to try and make every single character 3x3 pixels or smaller.. punctuation marks failed :<



(doesn't match the quality of Perlin's font, though)

[laserghost]

Yes. Because the RGB elements of a single pixel are side-by-side, by varying the hue of a pixel you're also varying the position of the illuminated part of the pixel. Because the sub-pixel elements are always in the same order (RGB) you can use this to add detail to text at a sub-pixel level. I did have a white-on-black 3x3 pixel font that I'd done as an experiment using this technique, but I can't find it now and it wasn't all that good anyway.

Quite informative, thanks.

[kometbomb]

The RGB trick is also available under various trademarks, such as Microsoft's ClearType.

Here's an example:



Each black square tells you which colors you need to turn off (since we are drawing a black pixel on white background), e.g. for the top-left pixel you need to draw a red pixel and a cyan (green and blue) pixel for the next pixel on the right.

But it's not like you get three times the horizontal resolution.