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.
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.