I Made a Font!

2025-03-05 - [53] 12:20

Instead of doing other stuff I "should" have been doing around February 13/14th, I decided to design an 8x8 pixel typeface for the Shavian alphabet in case I felt like making an NES or Game Boy game that exclusively uses the Shavian alphabet. Unfortunately, as I used the program GIMP, I ended up making a PNG image, which doesn't translate well into making a font file, at least from what I have seen on Linux. To remedy this, I painstakingly and manually converted the PNG text glyphs to pixel perfect SVG images...

After manually converting each glyph to unique SVG images for each glyph, I decided I should probably include the rest of the printable ASCII chacters. The tool I used to make the font from SVG images was FontForge. I made the initial PNG image in GIMP and made the SVGs in Inkscape. I make no promise on adding the rest of the Latin-1 characters. This set is good enough for me at the moment.

I really just wanted an 8x8 pixel typeface for retro console projects of mine if I felt like exclusively using the Shavian alphabet for whatever reason, and I accomplished that.

A feature I wanted for this font is a "top-heavy" nature that reminded me of the typeface used for Splatoon 3 splatfests. Because 8x8 pixels (really 6x7 pixels in order to make sure each character has at least a pixel of space) is so small for the Shavian alphabet, I added cross lines to the Tot, Dead, Fee, and Vow characters and connected the curve to the staff of the Peep and Bib characters.

The inspiration for this pixel font comes from a text mod for the game "Milk Outside a Bag of Milk Outside a Bag of Milk (Milk2)", which can be seen at the following link.

This font is called "Eight By Eight" and at least for the moment, it's licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, although I might change the license to something closer to the CC0 (Creative Commons "No Rights Reserved") license in the future. Honestly, I just want to find some license that generally lets folks do what they want with the font without folks generally being able to claim they made this font instead. I don't care too much about attribution, as long as someone else isn't saying they're the creator. Hopefully I'll find a suitable license soon-ish.

Below is a link to the "fonts" page of my site, in case I feel like making more fonts in the future.

If you want to download the (OpenType) font directly, you can do so at the following link.

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