Making of a font for Verbarius clock

On the one hand, a pixel font is easier to make. But on the other hand, it’s more difficult.

With type size of 12-14 points you can’t really have any subtle features.

And my first intention was to make a pixel version of Artemius which is all about little quirks.

The result was this:

Firstly, it simply does not look good. Secondly, the letterforms are too thin. The clock is not that large, and it would lack readability.

So I tried to make it thicker.

Well, this is better, though doesn’t look much like Artemius.

Lets try it on the clock (photograph of a sample on a scale of 1 monitor pixel to 1 panel pixel):

No, no, no. It sucks. Too wide. Longer phrases won’t fit. And it looks bad again. All right, I got it. It’st useless to try to render our specialty typeface with all its peculiarities into a single-color pixel form. I should make a new one.

Ah, this one I like.

It’s almost fine. Lets try the capitals and the numbers.

And all the lowercase type.

Good. Only good is not good enough, so it’s bad.

It’s a little too heavy for its size. And there is need for more space. The counters should be larger. It all means I have to redesign it another time.

This is it. I say, it’s done. “C” and “e” have opened up. The contrast is almost gone. The type is bigger, yet long phrases fit just fine.

Now it’s time for everything else. I won’t go for exquisite “g,” but I’ll make another twist—letters “y” in Cyrillic and Latin will look different. This is fun and no one will know.

OK, I can now go on to special characters and kerning.