8 ms·
Retrocide Mono – A monospaced font with no decenders
- treetalker 1y agoThe qu i ck brown f ox jumps over the lazy do 9
- ricardobeat 1y agoLetter spacing is not great for that 'i' indeed. Monospace fonts use a very wide serif at the bottom, or an extended arm to make the i appear equally-spaced, which this typeface seems to have ignored.
- wildlogic 1y agoThanks for the feedback. I'll give this a try.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- anotherlab 1y agoI could see using this for a specialized use, for a game or a presentation. But day to day use, the jarring design of the letters that would have had descenders would be like a mental speed bump for me.
- wildlogic 1y agoHey, this is my first font design, constructive criticism welcome! Thanks.
- whiterook6 1y agoIt's very nice, but why? The lack of descenders makes it slightly harder to read. More of the letters look the same.
- kiba 1y agoIt's perfect for my use case, which is making individual square letters to print. PITA to ensure that the square are uniform when the letters are not uniform in size.
- JSR_FDED 1y agoLove how legible this is. Exactly how my brain (trained on 8-bit micros) expects a font to look!
- nullchan 1y agoDid you ask Claude to make your design futuristic? I sometimes get the same layout haha.
- ginko 1y agoThe vertical lines look a bit thin on my ~110PPI screen. Especially the down line in lowercase 'p'.
- egorfine 1y agoLowercase f, l and t are crimes against humanity.
- p0w3n3d 1y agoGreat job! I've tried many times to design a font and failed. That said, here's some: I'd love to see multiple weights. Not just bold, the new fonts can have multiple weights. Italic could help also but with the letters staying in the box. Also, the letters are too much to the left to my liking. Large amount of space between letters makes it even more visible.
- sph 1y agoPlease add a github release with the assets (ttf, otf, etc.). I'm developing an open-source font repository+downloader and it will make it easier to write an install script for it.
- jen729w 1y agoAmazing effort for a first font. I probably won't use it, but who cares! It's cool. Do more fonts. Do more things. I thank you.
- tomashubelbauer 1y agoI really like the look of the font, great job!
- tobr 1y agoYou’ve picked a difficult way to make your first typeface. A monoline design with a strict vector grid doesn’t leave a lot of room for the kind of optical adjustments needed for balanced and readable letter shapes. But I think even if you want to be strict about those restrictions there is a lot of room for improvement in consistency and composition of each shape. I started to write actionable suggestions about individual letters but realized it’s probably better to drop this link, which starts at how to draw an ”A” and continues with every letter of the alphabet. https://ohnotype.co/blog/ohno-type-school-a https://ohnotype.co/blog/ohno-type-school-a
- Terretta 1y agoI find it legible except for y becoming u
- rvschuilenburg 1y agoAesthetically, great. But i can't help but find it harder to read this font. Probably cool for things such as a poster or album art, but not something i'd enjoy using in my code editor.
- networked 1y agoCool concept. I like the lowercase q a lot. The misaligned dot (tittle) on the lowercase i and j bugs me. It feels off to have it at different heights. I'd try making the i taller to match the j.
- billev2k 1y agoI'd prefer a greater difference between ( ) and { }, and between : and ; But that's for using it as my daily driver, which doesn't seem to be the actual motivation.
- specialist 1y agoI hate myself for loving Retrocide so much. Well done.
- camtarn 1y agoNo descenders - fine. But I find the lowercase L, and to a lesser extent the lowercase F, very unpleasant looking. Something to do with the overly intrusive and segmented curve.
- kurtis_reed 1y agoWhat's the benefit of no descenders?
- foofoo12 1y agoAesthetics, if that's your thing.
- zokier 1y agoIn theory it allows to pack text tighter with minimal line spacing.
- willvarfar 1y agoits popular in basic games where fonts are made from bitmap glyphs and pixels are at a premium.
- lhmiles 1y agoCool! I love it! To really show it off you could compare yours vs a regular one with line height = 0.9 or something
- okayishdefaults 1y agoI'm unsure if "no descenders" provides increased clarity. For example, lowercase q is easy to recognize because your eyes are already drawn to it being one of few characters that descend. In the case of this font, you have a small uppercase Q as the lowercase q. This feels like it accomplishes the opposite of this stated benefit.
- foofoo12 1y agoNowhere does it promise to increase clarity. In one place it says "modern clarity", which is in my opinion and many cases worse than non-modern clarity.
- drob518 1y agoYep, I agree. Your eyes need these clues to help you read at speed. When every character looks similar, you have to slow down to look at individual characters, rather than just glancing at a whole word.
- dlisboa 1y ago> I'm unsure if "no descenders" provides increased clarity. Of course not: if it did we would be doing it that way everywhere. Typeface design has thousands of years of history, there's only a few major variations in latin types and we've tried them all. Descenders exist for a reason. This type is pretty cool for what it is meant for, the retro aesthetics. Old school digital displays (like alarm clocks) don't have descenders so it fits pretty well.
- 1y ago
- jiehong 1y agoAncient Latin and Ancient Greek also did just that: lowercase didn’t exist yet. Makes me want to try and write code in uppercase only (or not). I like the theme of the website, though!
- card_zero 1y agoThe squished descenders are surprisingly not horrible. (They are horrible in some actual 80s fonts from 8-bit devices.) But I don't like the giant intrusive 'l' that looks like a ladle, it's got too much character.
- fifticon 1y agozx spectrum is very offended by your remarks, and would like to have a word with you :-) I can see that g with my eyes closed.
- card_zero 1y agoHa, that's the one, I knew there was one particularly egregious g.
- wisty 1y agoLooks cool, I feel like lowercase g and maybe p could be a bit taller, g looks a bit out of place with its height.
- littlecranky67 1y agoTried this on my 24" 1080p screen as a vscode font, but it is way to thin. Seeems there is no font weight support to make it "bolder"?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tdeck 1y agoIt reminds me of the rather strange story of the Mormon "Deseret Alphabet" which was designed to not have descenders, in order to reduce uneven wear on the pieces of type. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet
- rckt 1y agoSorry, but it's hard to read for me. I have to really look at what's written to recognise the letters. That's the opposite of a good font. Good font is easy to run through. But maybe it's just me.
- DoctorOetker 1y agowhen showcasing fonts please also showcase pre-rendered font images, because some of us override website fonts for legibility (and possibly speed or memory consumption)
- yoz-y 1y agoLooks cool, I wouldn’t code with this but for something like game decals it could be nice. My main problem is the low height of the lower case letters. For coding I prefer fonts that actually have them slightly taller than normal (namely JetBrains Mono)
- eichin 1y agoFlashbacks to the Okidata Microline 80 dot matrix printer I used in high school (early 1980s) - it had a 7-wire print head, so no descenders and lower case "g" was particularly bad (basically to get the detail in 7 lines it had a squashed shape and it was moved up in the box, looking more like a weird "9".) My teachers were... tolerant but mildly annoyed, mostly because they knew just how bad my handwriting was :-)
- xyzsparetimexyz 1y agoIt's really hard to tell at a glance which letters are capitalized or not
- icedchai 1y agoI like the retro look-and-feel, I just don't find it especially readable.
- tracker1 1y agoI kinda hate it... I mean it looks cool aesthetically, but IMO it's actually harder to read.
- simlevesque 1y agoI hate the lowercase l. it looks off center.