June 20th, 2008
Design Graveyard: Pixeltype Edition
A free download from our drawer of unfinished projects.
This morning I was flipping through some of our old work over coffee and stumbled across a display typeface we designed for a client website in 2004. The website never saw the light of day, and the typeface, a 41-pixel tall pixel font, never made it out of Photoshop.
Just past the peak of pixel font popularity, there were a few type companies experimenting with controlled sub-pixel anti-aliasing, but they were mainly focused on text fonts for mobile phones, and had little use for our display face. Without the know-how to digitize it ourselves, the design sat shelved in an archive folder.
Today we take it off the shelf, give it a name, and offer it for free download under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.1 Japan License.
As a layerd PSD, it’s a bit of a pain to use, but perfectly suitable for page titles and headlines of a few words. The design draws loose inspiration from all over the place from sports jerseys to heavy metal t-shirts, so some letter pairs work better than others. We’ve left in all the outtakes and unlikely ligatures for you to play with.
If you make something with it, please leave us a comment, or send an email and we’ll post it here!
After studying graphic design and Japanese language and aesthetics, Chris moved to Tokyo in 2001 to begin his design practice.
He co-founded AQ in 2004 to bring design basics to cultural organizations with bilingual websites. In his current role as managing director, Chris works with clients to clarify their ideas, oversees the creative process and designs.
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