A thread to celebrate pixel fonts!
This thread’s for sharing fonts, naturally, but also for sharing resources for making or learning about pixel fonts.
Font Creation Resources
Firstly, a couple of resources if you’re wanting to explore making pixel fonts:
BitFontMaker2
If you’re interested in exploring pixel fonts without much prior experience in font creation I can’t recommend BitFontMaker2 highly enough. It’s incredibly simple to learn, running fully in the browser without requiring any additional tools, offers live preview of fonts whilst you work and will export to .ttf format.
It’s also surprisingly fully featured, with support for monospace fonts, user specified glyphs beyond latin character sets and the ability to reimport fonts for editing.
There’s limitations - no kerning pairs, limited number of glyphs per font file - but as a place to learn the basics, or to create something quickly for a small project it’s fantastic.
Pixel Font Converter
A little setup is required to make the most of Pixel Font Converter: you’ll need to build your own glyph sheet in your image editor of choice, and you’ll need to be willing to do a little maths to get glyphs to render properly. But it’s absolutely worth it, with unlimited glyph support, kerning pairs, export to .ttf or .otf, easy import/export of settings and plenty of additional features.
FontForge
Beyond the scope of this thread, but a great tool to be aware of. Also useful if you need to add more kerning pairs or edit metadata for existing pixel fonts!
Fonts
Silver
Silver promotes itself as aiming to be “the defacto font for pixel games and applications”, and is a fantastic choice! It’s clean and very legible, and has support for an absolutely huge range of glyphs across many languages.
Licencing here is a little odd - for projects with a budget or earnings of under $100,000USD it’s listed as CC BY 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution), but must be licenced for use in anything above. Worth bearing in mind!
monogram
monogram is gorgeous. It’s a monospace font with wide, rounded counters that help with legibility, a wide range of available glyphs, and even a full family of italics!
It’s also CC0 licenced, so can be freely used in any project.
Doodly Dialect
It’s hard to pick a single font from VEXED, but I’ve got a special fondness for Doodly Dialect, a sketchy and off-kilter display font that to me evokes the charms of aliasing when rotating small sprites.
If it’s not the right fit for your project though, you should absolutely check out VEXED’s other fonts - there’s well over 50 at this point, so there’s every chance you’ll find a great fit.
pirkkala
From Otto Ojala (whose games you should absolutely play, incidentally), pirkkala is a very playful, entirely lower case font available under cc0. I can’t get enough of the eccentric double-storey “a”, but there’s a lot to enjoy here :)