Pixel fonts

Apologies for the lack of postings. March and April were just one big blur. Family illness took up the bulk of it, with me and 2 of my kids getting pneumonia in the process. Plus, we were doing lots of projects, which take time. Anyhow, I'm back and hope to be back for a while.



On Bitmap World this week, I had a comic where I had to depict a flashy commercial. What I envisioned as a moderate strip (meaning some new art, but a real detailed strip), ended up taking near 5 hours to complete! The art was a bit tricky--I really wanted to give that third panel a look of a cheesy movie--but the real time drain were the fonts. I have used regular fonts in the strip before, but very minimally. Bottom line, it's a pixel a comic so pixel fonts really work the best. I wanted to have different fonts for the effect balloons in the second panel, and one for the main ad. There are a lot of great pixel fonts out there, and a lot of good "block" ones. Problem is the sizing. Despite being pixels, some pixel fonts need to be displayed at larger sizes to be legible. Since our strip works in close quarters, that eliminates many options.

In the end, I did find several fonts that worked, but the main font for the "ad" had to be heavily modified by hand. I like the way it turned out, but literally looking at the end result and the work put into it, it seems a bit disproportionate.

I do want to give a plug to the font site Da Font. They have a great collection of free fonts and their interface is really easy to use. However, the one thing they excel in is that they feature a map of each font. This is particularly good when you are looking at dingbat fonts, since you can view them all. I actually download a copy of the map with the font so I have it for future reference.

Waving to my one follower here! Thanks for reading. If anyone else wants to jump on the bandwagon, just click the button at the right, k?