#adventoffonts — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #adventoffonts, aggregated by home.social.
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 25
Pixelbricks
I've done a few top-heavy or bottom-heavy fonts, and even some squared off... how about a chaotic squared-off heavy font that just goes where it wants and does it condensed for good measure.
Welcome Pixelbricks!
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 24
The Untouchables
Ocean gave us this 1920s prohibition romp based on the star-studded movie of the same name in 1989.
Interesting for us are the two art deco fonts - this one being the 8x8 that uses every available pixel.
I've added a lower-case in the same style and created a "Revised" version that applies the same treatment to the numerics & symbols.
https://dl.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/The+Untouchables.zip
Now that other gorgeous 16x16 font...
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 23
NLQ
A fresh new serif font that pushes to the edges of the bounding box available in 4 styles - regular, italic, bold and small.
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 22
Slaine
Martech Games' 1987 release takes the 2000 AD comic character Slaine on a tricky-to-play atmospheric adventure.
The game actually features three fonts - a sharp digital one on the title screen, a small one for dialog and an old-style one used for the main interface which I've converted here.
The same in-game fonts were used on the CPC, C64 and ZX versions.
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 21
ZX Space Highway
Justin Penner's Space Highway is an great typeface that encapsulates the feel of old sci-fi covers and posters.
While Justin has made pixel fonts this one was fully scalable and just itching for an 8x8 pixel adaptation in my eyes... and so I made it.
You can find the real Space Highway and other cool free typefaces in Justin's 36 Days of Type at https://justinpenner.ca/projects/36-days-of-fonts/
https://dl.damieng.com/fonts/zx-origins/ZX%20Space%20Highway.zip
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 20
Street Rod 2
This 1991 DOS and Amiga game sees you attempting to acquire and then modify 1960s street hot rods and race them with plenty of engine tuning and under-the-hoot changes.
The font is a clean, easy-to-read one that is a little unusual in that it is both narrow and features a light touch of serifs for a bit of class.
https://dl.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/Street%20Rod%202.zip
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 19
Got Soul
The pull between consistency and individual glyph flair in a typeface is a difficult balance to get right. I have a tendency to come up with a "style" for a font and then stick to it rigidly throughout the entire character set.
Got Soul embraces bold and then lets each glyph breathe life into its pixels whether that's wider or narrower, curvy or straight, while still feeling cohesive.
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 18
Dan Dare
A regular strip in British comic The Eagle, this brave "Pilot of the Future" is usually battling evil Mekon - a green alien with a giant head.
The game involves exploring a space station, opening doors, battling enemies and solving puzzles.
Importantly for us is the dashing comic-book style font which I've extended here with small-caps for the lower-case and additional symbols.
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 17
Crossed
I've tried variants of this a few times - the idea of lines and curves that overshoot like sticks. A previous one was called Bamboo but I unpublished it not long after as it's just had to get right.
This one I feel came off a bit better than that. Mostly readable with a lot of edge and flair - use sparingly!
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 16
Stop
My first encounter with this typeface was probably Datel (of Action Replay fame) ads in Crash and Your Sinclair but it actually goes back to 1970 and was really made popular by Letraset.
I've done a couple of Stop-like fonts (including one called Datel Tribute) before but this one, recovered from GEOS floppies by way of a PDF, is a much more faithful adaptation!
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 15
ForwardSlash
A very simple and clean oblique that sacrifices descenders for that maximum 8-pixel height.
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 14
Typewriter
Another lost gem found among the sectors of floppy discs for GEOS this American Typewriter inspired 8x8 oozes character and pushes the pixels to the very boundary of the box.
If you use this one at least an extra pixel or two of vertical space between rows would be advised!
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 13
Bubble 07
Agent Bubbles your mission, should you choose to accept it, is it infiltrate an 8-bit video game and assume the role of the main typeface.
An all-original 60s vibe fun typeface with a sneaky side.
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 12
The Muncher
Beam Software mostly remembered for The Hobbit and Way of the Exploding Fist but back in 1988 they also released a curious tie-in...
The Mucher is an arcade city-destroying romp featuring the T-Rex from ... The Chewits Adverts (a UK sweet/candy) .
The game was colorful and quite but importantly for us the Speccy version features a unique and on-point font!
https://dl.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/The%20Muncher%20ZX.zip
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 11
Saucer
4/5 pixel wide gylphs allow 51 characters per line on a Speccy and unlike the 3/4 pixel width can still be readable.
4 pixels can be tricky for glyphs like I, T, W and M and I went for pure clarity with Area51 in 2021.
This time there's an alternate, weird, quirky and different take on getting into 4/5 pixel widths...
Screenshots are rendered here with 8x8 so don't do it justice.
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 10
Helvetica9
This 9 point - presumably unofficial version - was found in Glenn Holmer's GEOS font catalog PDF likely from one of the many disks he generates that from. (There are also larger sizes but they don't fit in 8x8)
Obviously designed as proportional typeface the screenshots don't quite do it justice!
The FZX file included in the ZIP has a proportional variant.
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 9
Magchrome
Typefaces with unusual blobs were early forms of character recognition by computers before decent OCR but that didn't stop type designers picking up the idea and using them however they felt for purely stylistic reasons.
This font takes that idea and combines it with the 80s chrome effect to come up with something a litle more unique!
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 8
Robocop Arcade
Data East's 1988 side-scrolling shoot-em-up had some reasonable home conversions but only the arcade featured this font (and a couple of others)
Stark, angular and a little rough it embodies the distopian corporate decay rather well and unusually (for an arcade font) includes lower-case!
https://dl.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/Robocop%20Arcade.zip
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 7
Expedition
Bold, adventurous, and up to the knees in mud this wellington-boot wearing font dares to go where other typefaces do not adorning a serif here and there with reckless abandon.
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 6
Great Giana Sisters (C64)
Tempted by the success of Super Mario Bros Rainbow Arts comissioned Armin Gessert & Manfred Trenz to create a Mario-like game.
The result was Great Giana Sisters which although similar to Mario had different enemies, characters, maps & powerups.
It was not different enough for Nintendo...
I've added my own interpretation of a lower case to round it off again.
https://dl.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/Great%20Giana%20Sisters.zip
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 5
Clear Plan
A new attempt at providing a very clear, easy to read font in 8x8 pixels. Despite 33 prevous "Clean" fonts I've managed to come up with something I like here in both plain and a semi-bold.
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 4
A Rock Star At My Hamster
Colin Jones' 1988 game see you take the role of a rock star manager trying to climb the charts.
With it's colorful graphics, cheeky puns and procedurally generated music it was easy to overlook the fun 8x8 comic font which was, unusually, actually used across all 5 platforms.
I've added lower case by way of small-caps based on the original for a more complete set.
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 3
Kilonova
An original, futuristic oblique with a daring x-height available in a regular and a variant that uses stress on the horizontals rather than the verticals to achieve a unique bolder look.
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 2
Disney's Mulan (Gameboy)
This Gameboy game based on Disney's Mulan exudes character and the rough brush-font is gorgeous.
Originally only upper-case I extended this with my own lower-case attempt and missing symbols!
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2025 Day 1
Day Out!
A new and original fun, bubbly, bold and top-heavy font for any kind of energetic and approachable game!
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 5
IBM-3270
IBM's 1971 terminal set the stage for "green screen" interfaces for a few decades even long after the addition of a few more colours.
The terminal font is surprisingly stylised for a business machine and it's reproduced here as best as it can in an 8x8 pixel font with bold variant.
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2023 Day 25
Melanie
I created this stylish new 8x8 bitmap font after being inspired by a recent fully-scalable typeface called Melindrosa by Flavia Zimbardi.
If you're looking for a gorgeous new art deco font you should definitely check it out at https://flaviazim.com/typefaces/melindrosa
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2023 Day 23
Quirky PC
Early PC video cards featured a familiar serif 8x8 font.
Over the years different manufactures tweaked a few glyphs (ATI), made a serif version (Amstrad), or just plain stylized parts (AMI & Phoenix BIOS) all of which gave a slightly off-brand feel.
Here's a new font that celebrates those differences by embracing these odd quirks for a very not-quite-in-Kansas PC feel.
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2023 Day 21
Matinee
The 1920's art deco movement has inspired a lot of design and plenty of typography to go with it. Personally having already published SIX such 8x8 typefaces I wasn't sure I could do something new...
Matinee however takes that art deco, keeps it bold and contrasted and yet softens some hard edges to keep it friendly and comes with a small caps variant.
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2023 Day 20
Atari ST 6x6
The Atari ST used the GEM "Graphical Environment Manager" for its desktop UI and this cute little 6x6 font deviated from the usual GEM one to provide something that felt compact but without too much compromise.
https://download.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/Atari+ST+6x6.zip
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2023 Day 18
Discworld
Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels are a fantastical comedic romp through a crazy world of heroes, villains and improbable but familiar situations.
The 1995 graphical adventure loosely follows the "Guards, Guards!" book and adorns the game with gorgeous art and voice acting and a small pixel font for us to admire.
https://download.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/Discworld.zip
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2023 Day 16
Uni9
Uni9 is another GEOS font this time attempting to reproduce the incredible Universe font in a mere 9 point size. It's a very nice adaptation and the fixed-width renderer here doesn't quite do the font justice (note the trimming of g and y to squeeze it in to 8 pixels).
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2023 Day 15
ZX Revue
Revue, created by Colin Brignall in 1968, could be found everywhere in the 70s & 80s. Gamers might recognize it from the title screen and livery of the 1987 arcade classic After Burner from SEGA.
Here's a brand new attempt to squeeze that distinctive face, complete with lower-case, into an 8x8 grid and the outcome is quite successful I think.
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8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2023 Day 1
Manic
When I saw a remake of Manic Miner called Manic Person under development on the Spectrum Computing forums I thought a custom font would polish off the look.
Alas the game didn't have 768 bytes left to fit it in so here it is up for adoption in both tall and short styles.