Marcin WicharyThis week at Config I gave a talk about pixel fonts that I think turned out really well.
It’s called “In defense of an old pixel,” and I don’t think I ever worked harder on a talk before. Check it out here! (25 minutes)
YouTube
Part of it was a fun audience collaboration where we all took a stab at designing an 8x8 pixel font letter. This is a video taken by one of the audience members that shows what it felt like in the moment:
And this is the end result, after volunteer moderators removed all the irrelevant – and sometimes not-safe-for-the-slides – submissions. It’s 1,225 letters sent in from the audience within a few minutes.
Would anyone be interested in behind-the-scenes walkthrough in how this talk was made? Please let me know + whether there are specific things you might be curious about!
Michael B. Johnson@mwichary My daughter saw it live and really enjoyed it! I was intrigued by her description...
Is it online? Would love to hear whatever you want to share...
Is it online? Would love to hear whatever you want to share...
Federico Reinfeld@mwichary yes! Absolutely. I was in awe at all the screen animations, the way you rendered the bitmaps with the fuzzy CRT look…
@mwichary Loved the talk. So much research! Again, whatever you want to share, would love to see it.
I assume the talk was done with the new Figma Slides?
Brendan Thompson
Doug Wilson@mwichary 100% - I kept thinking while watching the video “How did he do this live?!”
Jason Santa Maria@mwichary Would love to read about that!
Tekl@mwichary Oh, yes please. 🥺
Francis 🏴☠️ Gulotta@mwichary those are great animations
Andy McMillan
Erik (📚🧑🏻💻👾)@mwichary Yes, please! That was truly impressive seeing all these things happing on screen! I want to know it all through the bottom of the rabbit hole! 😂
Hurgotron ✔@mwichary I would actually be interested in a copy of your collection of 3500 8x8 fonts. Looks like (at least in the US) bitmapped fonts are not copyrightable, which means it should be legal.
Briala@mwichary I used to love creating character sets for my home computer. I bought graph paper at one point during high school specifically to do this. Turns out 8x8 grids are pretty limiting...
Magnus Ahltorp@ahltorp @mwichary Be thankful you have pixels. The original Deluge Synthstrom (a portable groovebox) had a display of four seven segment displays - which it used for all text communication! There was a special page in the manual showing all the letter shapes...
Newer versions have a small OLED screen instead which can display far more text and is much easier to read.
@static @mwichary Yes, I’ve designed seven segment fonts (for fun) as well, but only for a very limited amount of letters. Even limiting yourself to hexadecimal looks really weird, with the need to mix upper and lower case.
Motorola manufactured a taxi cab display that only used seven segment displays and was used in Stockholm in the ‘80s. You learnt eventually, and it helps when there are a set number of messages.