I was watching a video on YouTube when this monospaced sort-of connected script with sort-of Lombardic caps caught my eye.

It’s the font for Tower of Despair (AKA Argent Warrior), a text adventure published in 1984 by Games Workshop (yes, that GW) for the ZX Spectrum.

I based my version only on found screenshots, thus |J|Q|Z|q|z| are personal guesses. Punctuation and numbers seem to vary, I suspect based on different ports (notably the Commodore 64).

Best used in multiples of 8pts.

My personal list of improvements I would like to see to the wonderful and amazing tool that is FontStruct.

They are related to the way I use it, and I have no idea how hard these changes would be to implement, or how useful they could be for others.

Perhaps, even, some of these features already exist an I just didn’t RTFM.

The list is in progress. 

What if Bank Gothic tried to dress up as Copperplate Gothic for Halloween?

A neon-signs-inspired chromatic fontstruction for the Color Competition.

A ⅝×⅞ pixel typeface, an experiment mainly intended as a tool to annotate your fontstructions while building. And, of course, I couldn’t resist the punny name ;-)

Almost all of it is comprised in the Google Fonts Basic set.

Started as just a clone of the invaluable resource that is djnippa’s All Composites saved in MY BRICKS.

I added some angles and rearranged them in a manner that works better with my way of fontstructing. Also added the relative widths of 1-square-wide slopes.

Perhaps it can be useful for someone else too.

WARNING: Many bricks are flipped and/or rotated, stack with caution.

I may make a 2×2 version sooner or later. In the meantime, please let me know if I missed anything.

An earlier (1926) constructed alphabet from Jan Tschichold, based on a somewhat finer grid and a slightly less condensed uppercase and a bolder appearance overall.

With a caps-height of 17, reproducing some diagonals proved quickly to be between nightmarish and impossible, thus the fidelity is a bit less exact than my previous recreation.

For a digitisation that encompass both designs and offers proper alternates, you can look at Peter Wiegel’s Tschichold.

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 ;-)

My version of Jan Tschichold’s “Schmale Grotesk - Leicht und schnell konstruierbare Schrift” (narrow grotesque - font that is easy and quick to construct), from 1930.

Turns out it isn’t always “quick and easy” to translate a pen and straightedge approach to constructed letters into Fontstruct’s prefabricated bricks setting.

In expanding the glyph coverage, I tried to remain true to the spirit of the original self imposed limitations, both in terms of grid (e.g. the cramped space for the uppercase diacritics), and of tools (see the solution for  superscripts et similia).

The font covers all of Google Fonts Basic set and, given the c-caron present in the source, all of Czech orthography. I may try to add other Eastern European languages in the future.

There are many different takes on the same source (including for the visual identity of a museum), you can look at Serious, here on Fontstruct, or at Iwan Reschniev, for an extensive expansion in weights and typographic features.

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome :-)

See also Quick and Easy and New.

A recreation of the font used on the early CRT terminals from IBM, based on this source by Marcin Wichary.

I find there is a particular charm in the crudeness of some solutions compared to subsequent iterations or other 5x7 pixel fonts (see, for example, the numerals and |C|U|Y|).

I reproduced only the characters shown in the aforelinked image, placing them in what I considered to be the appropriate Unicode place.

I tried to look for some more glyphs (comma anyone?) but failed to find reliable sources.

A recreation of the first San Francisco from 1984, originally called Ransom, by the incomparable Susan Kare.

I noticed that among the various recreations of the original bitmap fonts for the Macintosh, this iconic design was missing, so I decided to fill the gap.

I used an image rather than the font as a reference, and don’t know the intended point size, the spacing could be off, and the number of characters is unfortunately very limited.

I started this... more than eleven years ago (!), and changed directions at least a couple of times along the way, so perhaps it would have been better to start from scratch.

Anyway, I thought it would be an appropriate typeface for the holiday season :-)

A little experiment with the "connect" bricks (and an healty dose of stacking). I wasn't referencing any specific example of the style (of which there are many), but I'm sure that, looking for solutions as I went, I ended up with something similar to already existing typefaces (and fontstructions).

Unfortunately, some connecting bricks don't align exactly, so I had to resort to approximate them, when possible, with more stacking, which didn't particularly help the already lacking consistency in construction.

But enough moaning, enjoy!

My take on a thin sans.

It should cover all Western European languages (plus Hawaiian and Hepburn romanisation).

First pass at light kerning done, will be refined with use.

Based on a font identification request over at Typography.guru.

A recreation of the typeface used for the titles of the film Sneakers, evidently inspired by the MICR aesthetics, filtered through the over-the-top flair of arcade video-games graphics.

Only |J|Q|Z| are done from scratch, but most letters still needed some interpretation in order to choose what to keep as a detail and what to discard as just an artefact.

As per the samples available, it's just uppercase (plus the lonely lowercase |c|).

It is possible that the original wasn't a pixel font after all, or that the pixels weren't square, and probably it had a higher resolution than 13×13.

A completely unoriginal typeface, that make up for its complete lack of personality with an equally complete lack of consistency.

Enjoy.

Inspired by a type identification request over at Typography.guru.

During developement, the tool has taken over, also helped by the scarcity of letters available in the original, making the design more sans than serif, and with strong MICR vibes in some places.

The name means "shoe shop" (also shoe repair or shoe making) in Italian.

At the moment the language coverage is limited to Western Europe.