8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 25
Z88
The Z80-powered Cambridge Z88 was an A4 lightweight portable that has built-in office-style apps and BBC Basic powered by 4xAA batteries for about 20 hours usage.
This pack includes the regular and bold versions of the Z88 font as well as the small font & lesser-used wide/bold font which I extended with lower-case.
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 24
Comical
Actual comic book typefaces are rather beautiful and Comic Sans - despite the name - doesn't really embrace the style instead opting for an unusual bendy lower case rather than the small caps angled lettering that accompanies gorgeous comic book art.
Here's an attempt of mine to embrace that real style keeping that small-caps tradition squeezed, as always, into an 8x8 pixel grid.
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 23
Revolution
Revolution Software published some of my favourite point'n click adventures - Beneath a Steel Sky, Lure of the Temptress and of course the excellent Broken Sword series (which we deserve a movie or animated show of).
Included here is the fonts to those but alas the Broken Sword font didn't fit so I took the GBA version which is just a render of OCR-B I think (so not pictured).
https://download.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/Revolution.zip
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 22
ZX Gona
Back on day 12 I provided a link to an article on Gona - a Latin typeface in Japan that is even more popular than Helvetica is in the western world.
While I'd adapted the similar Eurostile in the past I wondered if I could do Gona without it looking the same in 8x8 pixels... and it came out quite different. So here it is in both regular and bold variants!
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 21
Shadow of the Beast ZXCPC
Shadow of the Beast was a gorgeous atmospheric Amiga game that struggled to fit into less powerful machines.
The Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum versions while graphically constrained did however include this gorgeous 8x8 bitmap font.
https://download.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/Shadow+of+the+Beast+ZXCPC.zip
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 20
Star Maker
Olaf Stapledon's 1937 novel Star Maker sees the protagonist detach from his body and explore the infinite reaches of the universe across space and time.
A pervading theme in the book is both the physical isolation of life and the common connection across it all.
So here's my new sci-fi font that features strong connected lines and stars of isolation.
https://download.damieng.com/fonts/zx-origins/Star+Maker.zip
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 19
Rugrats: Time Travelers
This 1999 Game Boy Color game was based on the Nickelodeon kids TV show Rugrats and created by UK software firm Software Creations.
It features a fun, friendly, yet readable font that works very well in the constrained grid.
https://download.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/Rugrats+Time+Travelers.zip
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 18
Tanzanite
The Amiga was the first machine I had where fonts were no longer constrained into 8x8 pixels. I played with FED on the Workbench 1.3 extras disk for quite a while!
Here's a small tribute to Garnet, Ruby and Emerald!
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 17
Chylos
GEOS is a massively underappreciated piece of computing history providing usable Mac-like UI on 8-bit machines with a fraction of the available power.
It was also home to many great proportional and varied-sized bitmap fonts including this absolute gem found tucked away in a Glenn Holmer's "Cenbe Font Catalog" PDF.
I couldn't find any information beyond this such as the designer.
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 16
Exscusi
Francis Chouquet created the Scusi typeface in 2023 heavily based on Italian movie posters from the 60s and 70s themselves designed or influenced by the work of Sandro Symeoni.
Here's another attempt to squeeze such exquisite design into 8x8 pixels this time with square and rounded variants.
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 15
Colonization
Sid Meier is a legend in the empire-building sim games world. From Pirates! in 1987 to Civ 6 in 2016 you'd be hard pressed to find anyone else with more great sims under their belt let alone their name in the title.
This pack reproduces three complimentary fonts - a serif, a sans and a mini, all from the 1994 classic Sid Meier's Colonization.
https://download.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/Colonization.zip
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 14
Doublewear
Yugoslavian designer Vinko Ožić Pajić designed a for the Standard Konfekcija company in 1963 with a very unique and distinctive style.
While that company went out of business in 2003 type designers Marcus Leis Allion and Jonathan Barnbrook used this as inspiration for their 2006 typeface "Doublethink".
Here's my 8x8 pixel interpretation!
https://download.damieng.com/fonts/zx-origins/Doublewear.zip
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 13
Delphine
French software house Delphine produced some fine games in their time from point 'n click classics to rotoscoped cutting-edge platformers.
This bumper pack contains 4 fonts.
A neat wide sans from Future Wars/Operation Stealth....
the quirky UI font from Another World...
a high-contrast art-deco from Flashback...
and a striking bold font from the Genesis version of Shaq Fu!
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 12
Brashi
I was lucky enough to spend an afternoon on a practical introduction to Japanese calligraphy this year and the feel of those brushes have stuck with me.
Here's my attempt at heavy, deliberate, ink-filled brush strokes producing a Latin alphabet in an impossibly small 8x8 grid.
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 11
Yie Ar Kung Fu 128K
Home ports often neglect the arcade font of the original and the initial ZX Spectrum port of Yie Ar Kung Fu was no exception using the boring Speccy ROM font.
The 128K promoting "Stars on the 128" bundle included an 128K only version by Brian Beuken that featured this beautiful and unique brush-stroke full-height font.
I created symbols & small-caps lower case in the style.
https://download.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/Yie+Ar+Kung+Fu.zip
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 10
Patrol
A new and original compact and aggressive font with cut-outs, unexpected serifs, and a full lower-case all available in three weights!
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 9
Bomb Jack ZX
Tehkan's 1984 arcade platformer was a banger - instantly easy to get into and fun gameplay that was tricky to master.
While the arcade sported the now-famous Atari arcade font Elite System's 1986 Sinclair Spectrum conversion by Paul Holmes, Andy Williams and Karen Trueman went with a completely custom and rustic font of their own.
https://download.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/Bomb+Jack.zip
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 8
Wand
A brand-new original condensed italic/oblique with a slight curvature and flourishes gives a nice smooth and yet modern feel to anything set it in - even in so few pixels.
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 7
Hydra
You might recognize Colin Brignall's 1968 font Revue from Yu Suzuki's 16-bit 1987 classic After Burner where it was used for the title screen and arcade livery.
Curiously the in-game font is an adaptation of Stop but Atari came through a few years later with a great adaptation of Revue in their 1990 game Hydra.
https://download.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/Hydra.zip
You can learn more about Revue at https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/3485/revue
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 6
Radial
Looking back at my childhood I can see early signs of my love for fonts. One such sign was the joy in using a pen to paint in the letters on the tyres of my dads car.
Here's an 8x8 pixel font inspired by memories of the bold, oblique and solid capitals adoring the walls of those tires.
