Introduction

Fontastica is a type foundry founded by Antony Squizzato. The main goal of this project is to share pixel fonts and font techniques with pixel designers, type designers, and the designer community in general. This site is mainly focusing pixel font design, though you may also find some classic vector fonts ready for DPI greedy works.

The roots...pixel thoughts

In the coming words, you will read an overview of the way I came along to "modern" pixel font design, and how it did evolve through the years from my little world. The first time I have been drawing a charset... as far as I can remember it was in 1988 or 1989. The software in use was CyberPaint and the computer was an Atari 1040STF. At this time it was all done by hand with that atari mouse that would drive any graphic designer totally nut nowadays. Of course, the word "pixel art" was not the most adapted at this time :  obviously, it was the mainstream technique to draw charsets for screen use (ie. : demos or games). In 1989 I moved to the amiga scene. With that awesome machine, I started to design more and more pixel graphics, especially pixel charsets. We had many constraints to take into account before starting the pixel process. The first one was the specification given by the coder. Due to the code of demos and games mostly done in Assembler, we had to keep in mind the bit structure of the charsets : 8 pixels multiples. Graphic artists had to think in terms of sprites. The whole aliasing process was done by hand, since the one from acclaimed graphic tool Deluxe Paint was too smooth for resolutions of that low. And there was another specification for the color use :  the number of bitplans (2 bitplans being 2 colors, 3 being 8 colors, 4 being 16, 5 being 32 colors among a palette made of 4096 colors). The usual amiga demo was made using 320x256 overscan resolution, with 32 colors being displayed. With the next (and last) generation of Amiga, it was possible to use the AGA graphic mode, with 256 colors displayed at the same time, giving a boost to the graphics.

End of an era... and rebirth

With the growing use of 3D engines in games, there was a major change in the process of doing computer graphics. In fact, there was less pre-rendered bitmap and more realtime calculation. Some people would say that the run for technology and power also leaded to a loss of spirit. Computer graphics for games started merging with other industries such as cinema. As any industry reaching a mature state, things started to be more organized, with less opportunities for crazy ideas. Thanks to the web, there was a growing new interest for font design. The graphic design world was able to find a new source of inspiration from the web creative sources : oldschool pixel graphics, low tech themes, abstract 3D, low poly 3D... Some designers merged various influences and opened that to an international scene. People like Eboy mixed oldschool pixels and urban style. In Japan, Maniackers Design mixed videogame, manga and pop culture and created fonts out of these influences. Things were changing very quickly and some classic typeface designers were not that happy to see computer rookies creating fonts in few minutes out of filters, without any knowledge of type design. On the other side, I am convinced all of that did bring some fresh blood. Today, the goold old foundries are still there. I have been influenced by font labels such as T26 or Chank! when I discovered the web. Today, I do believe designers have to exchange influences and experiences so as to renew all the time.