Nuxt3 has been my stack of choice for a while now and it was time to port my site over from Nuxt2 — an exercise in itself I should blog about — but more concretely is the idea of excerpts.
December 2023 saw the third year of my Advent of Fonts project where I published a 24-day advent calendar of 8x8 pixel on Mastodon.
The 1920’s art deco movement has inspired a lot of design and plenty of typography to go with it. Personally having already published SIX such 8x8 typefaces I wasn’t sure I could do something new…
Revue, created by Colin Brignall in 1968, could be found everywhere in the 70s & 80s. Gamers might recognize it from the title screen and livery of the 1987 arcade classic After Burner from SEGA.
Narrow glyphs are common on the Speccy with 64-column routines gracing Your Sinclair as well as word-processors at the cost of readability.
The blobs on fonts were to allow optical or magnetic ink readers to quickly scan documents — many over a certain age will remember them from the bottom of cheques.
I’ve been using Nuxt quite extensively on the static sites I work on and host and use Cloudflare Pages to host them. It’s a great combination of power, flexibility, performance and cost (free).
I’ve been a big fan of Nuxt2 and Nuxt3 is definitely a learning curve and I have to admit the documentation is a bit lacking — lots of small fragments and many different ways to do things.
Here’s the ultimate day of my 2022 Advent of Fonts — a family of small fonts called Pixie. Included are the usual bold variant but also a squared-off digital and then a bell-bottomed one and even a stretched out top variant of that for a little unusual variety.
Day 19 of the 2022 Advent of Fonts is an original creation of a serif-style font that places them in a somewhat unusual decorative fashion rather than the typical alignment to aid in reading.
This font was originally drawn sometime in 2020 but never quite felt done. I dusted it off for the 2021 advent calendar but it still fit quite right.
A 2022 Advent of Fonts (Day 10) production that is sharp, bold, narrow and available in three weights.
A 2022 Advent of Fonts production based on the numerics and capitals from the 1986 arcade classic Outrun. The original is a gorgeous gradiented colour font with an based on Yu Suzuki’s previous game Space Harrier.
In December 2021 I tweeted a 24-day calendar of 8x8 pixel fonts.
A 2022 release that sat around for a while being experimented on in various forms and artistic stylings until settling on this after all sorts of experimentation with angles and slopes and then discarding them all.
I’ve been working on a system that heavily uses message queuing (RabbitMQ via MassTransit specifically) and occasionally the system needs to deal with large object graphs that need to be processed different — either broken into smaller pieces of work or serialized to an external source and a pointer put into the message instead.
Another January 2021 release this time contrasting sharp angles and rounded curves available in two weights and with small-caps for lower case.
Day 23 of my 2021 Advent of Fonts saw Raptor released.
I love art-deco/Parisian 1920s typefaces and I didn’t imagine I’d do another but on Day 19 of my 2021 advent of fonts I did just that.
Day 14 of my 2021 Advent of Fonts saw Vindicated released based on the box art and advertising materials for the 1988 video game The Vindicator.
A 2021 adaptation of another of DJR’s (David Jonathan Ross) fantastic typefaces — the LA-inspired Extendomatic for day 5 of my 2021 Advent of Fonts.
Day 3 in my 2021 Advent of Fonts and heavily based on the typography in the Apple TV adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.
OpenTracing is an interesting project that allows for the collection of various trace sources to be correlated together to provide a timeline of activity that can span services for reporting in a central system. They were competing with OpenCenus but have now merged to form OpenTelemetry.
I was recently brought in as a consultant to help migrate an existing system that used OpenTracing in .NET that recorded trace data into Jaeger so that they might migrate to the latest OpenTelemetry libraries. I thought it would be useful to document what I learnt as the migration process is not particularly clear.
A good SDK builds on the fundamentals of good software engineering but SDKs have additional requirements to consider.
A 2021 production with capitals originally inspired by DJR’s Extendomatic but with a lower-case entirely of its own better suited to the constraints.
A 2021 production that took an angular approach to art-deco then morphed it into a magnetic character recognition style with a closed variant.
A quick trip back to the 70s for a dip in the LCD & LED segment display technology that adorned watches, HiFi, and car audio equipment for a couple of decades.
A 2021 production combining the magnetic blobs with sharp angles of sci-fi to create something a little different.
Sometimes when designing a font it can start to feel similar to another one. Normally a quick flip to my page and I’ll find one that’s either similar enough that I should make drastic changes or it’s suitably different and I can continue. This one felt SO familiar but I couldn’t find anything in my pages, nor in my _incomplete, or old rejected deletions.
An alternate take on Hourglass inspired this time by Hoefler & Co.'s Decimal typeface that captures the feel of many classical watch faces.
A 2021 release that intersects the magnetic style of Computing 60s with a cut-out “stencil” style like No Step. A rounded-off version was added in 2022.
Jordan Mechner’s phenomenal ground-breaking Prince of Persia needs no introduction. Even if you weren’t around for the original, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about it or played one of the many more-modern remakes and sequels.
Slab-serif fonts are my favorite family of fonts. From the incredibly gorgeous Guardian Egyptian to Rockwell and so many other slabs.
A 2021 release that’s been sat around since 2020 but it was time to let it free or send it to the big bit bucket in the sky. It escaped and perhaps it’ll find a new home after all.
A hot-off-the-press 2021 production intended as a caps-only typeface based around the idea of a narrow oblique with very tight curves at the corners. A lower-case was added to complete the set, but it’s the capitals and numerics that shine on this typeface, and a proportional renderer like FZX kicks it into gear.
A 2021 production — yes, I’m still plotting in BASIN — that attempts to capture the feel of the Atari ST GEM/TOS high-res mode. The font itself can’t be translated as it’s way too tall being some 16 pixels high (yet only 8 wide).
A 2020 attempt at creating a serious looking font without all the bother of squeezing in ascenders and descenders by using a small caps version I last tried with Localhost (which was designed to look quirky and not professional).
I designed this font back in 2020 after seeing a screenshot of Star Quake — a game I very much enjoyed in my youth that had some nice early 8x8 typography.
I’m a big fan of point ‘n click adventures from my first experience with Monkey Island through Rex Nebula, Larry, Deponia, the incredible Broken Sword series as well as Simon the Sorcerer and modern takes such as Machinarium and Ron Gilbert’s excellent Thimbleweed Park.
An early 2020 effort that went through a few iterations having been originally inspired by the open contours of the Xenon II logo from the legendary game by The Bitmap Brothers.
I think I started this font in 2019 and polished it off some time in 2020. It sat unfinished for quite some time as I was reluctant to publish fonts with no lowercase which somewhat constrains what can be done when you don’t have adequate space for ascenders or descenders.
I designed this font in 2020 based on a few characters in the logo of the game Valorant.
An early 2020 release that has sat languishing for some time before publication. There’s some similarity with Reynolds which has held it back but when you look at screenshots in both there’s quite a subtle difference in the font size and choices in edges and letter forms.
I thought I’d covered most of the over-bold uneven styles I could in previous fonts but this one goes extreme in a top-heavy way and managed to pull off something a little different.
Air America was an airline from 1950 through the 1970s that looked to all appearances to be a regular airline. In reality, it was covertly-owned by the US Government for CIA operations to access places the US Military could not. Employee William G. Sherman took courses in typography drafting and created an entire typeface based on their logo. Much later, his son reached out to the Internet in turning that typeface into a digital version, and Aaron Bell of Saja Typeworks took up the task.
A 2020 design that goes with a squared-off angular bold look that still manages to look different — is somewhat the opposite bolding of my Trouble font with some alternative takes in places.
This creation is hot off the press being both designed and published the same day in April 2020.
I’d played around with doing a heavier bubblier version of Beachball that didn’t come out how I wanted, so when I spotted an Amiga Demo by the group Anarchy featuring a bubbly heavy weighted text, I was hooked.
Another one that started in 2019 that took some time to polish-off for release. The challenge here was to try and get a very clean looking flowing hand-written type. I’d already had a go with the hand-written style in Forgotten and a flowing type in Coolant but not both together. It’s especially challenging in a mono-space font because joining the characters is important and you don’t want long horizontal strokes creating ‘dashes’ between letters.
Probably created sometime towards the end of 2019 and dusted off in 2020 Reflex is an oblique font that leans back instead of forward. It’s an unusual style that I’ve only seen in real life when my left-handed schoolfriend slanted back in his exercise books.
A 2019 creation that managed to escape the _Incomplete folder in early 2020. It is aggressive, angular, and very tightly compressed. A bold variant was added in June 2022.
A 2019 production that that is aggressive, full of tech flair, and available in three weights.
Created in late 2019 and inspired by the original RoboCop logo this font is bold, chunky, industrial and angular.
The original Palm Pilot went on sale in March 1996 and sported 128kb of RAM, a 16Mhz Motorola MC68328 processor, and a tiny 160x160 monochrome display. Such a low-res display necessitated a small bitmap font, and the 16MHz CPU meant they could easily take advantage of proportional rendering to squeeze even more on-screen.
Introduced in 1937 Peignot (pronounced Pen-yoe) is a classic font with a distinctive lower-case that consists of mostly restyled capitals. A revival in the 70s and various TV shows through the 80s and 90s, including the first three seasons of Seinfeld, brought it back into the public eye.
My site goes back to 2004 and is reasonably sized but not massive even with the comments, so waiting 30 seconds for a change to reflect is disappointing.
Baby Teeth was designed by Milton Glaser in 1964, inspired by a hand-painted sign in Mexico City. Glaser used the design for his famous Bob Dylan poster in 1966.
I created this font in 2007 as a dark, brooding, oppressive font that instills a sense of dread — or at least as much as you can with a handful of pixels.
I designed this font in 2005 for the BASIN programming environment as a fun, bubbly font, much like the letters that adorned schoolbooks and pencil cases (and, occasionally, desks) in my youth.
I created this font as part of the BASIN package around 2006 to see just how bold you could go in an 8x8 grid while still making it readable.
I designed this font back in 2019 in BASIN to interpret the 1968 font Moore Computer developed by James H. Moore of Typographic House in 1968.
I created this font in 2018 thinking about the old flowing chrome letters of 60s refrigerators. It breaks the horizontal line a little bit to make it more practical.
I created this font around 2006 for the BASIN package.
Yet another font I created for the BASIN package around 2006 that wasn’t so much designed as burst forth as metal music should.
This typeface started as a 2006 BASIN production as Little Shadow, Little Shadow Bold, and Small Outline. I decided to combine them under a new name for this release — District — and produce a regular variant, the missing bold weight for the outline, and a squared version District Digital. Toward the end of 2020, I added a “Comic” style for further fun.
I’d already done Broadwary and two variants of Cinema — why another 20s art-deco font? Well, the simple reason is I don’t think either of them shows enough flair.
This font started life in 2005 as “Tall Order” and “Tall Order Bold” before being brushed off and two new condensed variants joined. The font was also renamed to better indicate this is a font that is all about the height and little consideration is given to the descenders.
Created in 2006 for BASIN with the goal of what drawing a font would be like if you hand-drew it and didn’t perform any clean-up.
A 2005 creation for BASIN with aggressive styling and flair — I’m sure there was some specific inspiration for this one but I’m at a loss as to where it came from.
I designed this font in 2019 as a softer alternative to the military-associated heavy stencil fonts used by many 8-bit games.
I created this font back in 2005–2006 for BASIN and it’s one of the more unusual.
A fast cutting font reminiscent of high speed, action-packed movie posters and video games I designed in 2019 using the trusty BASIN editor. A wide variant was added in July 2020.
I designed this font in 2019 when I saw Andy McDermott had written a text adventure set in France called Resistance that was using the built-in ROM font and created this from scratch to give it a hand-written French feel.
A 2021 third-attempt at a stencil font this one directly inspired by the USAF technical manual and sporting caps for both upper and lower (the latter being just 1 pixel shorter) for a serious look.
Flowing decorative flourishes and a distinctly human twist are hard to do justice in any format let alone 8x8 pixels. This font started in late 2019 as an attempt to take a break from a Blackletter font I later published as Byteletter.
Serif fonts have often been challenging in 8x8, and I’m always trying to see if I can do something new.
I designed this font in 2019 as an intersection between regular italic fonts and handwritten fonts.
A 2018 creation designed to give a recess or inset feel on the thick stems originally named Recess. In 2020 an angled variant was added and a new name adopted to make it suitable for an addition.
Another production for the 2006 BASIN development package originally named “Mark of Polish” but renamed “Reflections” to better suit the look.
I seem to have this knack for creating a font based on memories and when I compare it to the actual thing it’s quite different. This happened once again with this font which I thought I was drawing in 2018 in the style of some text I’d seen in Firefly and Serenity and so named it Reynolds after Captain Malcolm Reynolds. Searching online shows no such typographical style in Firefly at all!
A mid-2020 font that needed a bit of a push over the line to make it work. Angular and sharp with overshoots and pointed serifs.
This font originally designed in 2006 for BASIN saw some tweaks for the 2019 release. It was designed to look sleek, angular, and industrial.
The font is a fresh creation from 2019 with inspiration out of nowhere. A few letters in it took a life of its own as it wraps and sparkles with a futuristic flair.
I designed this font in 2019 in an attempt to create a font with less x-height than I had designed before while also slipping in serifs.
A 2020 BASIN production with a sharp aggressive type with pointed vertical strokes.
Uncial is a style of lettering used between the 4th to 8th century by Latin and Greek scribes. You can imagine this 2006 BASIN production had its work cut-out (and a typo meant it was called Unical).
This font started as You Square in 2006’s BASIN as a simple digital square font. It later received a bold weight and finally a wide variant too.
American Type Founders designed the OCR-A font in 1968 to aid machines in recognizing the characters optically long before advanced OCR technologies were available. The goal was to be both machine and human-readable, and it was a great success and is still used today in a variety of places despite being followed by the more human-friendly OCR-B.
I love point ‘n click adventures and, seeing Sierra’s Quest for Glory recently put me on a mission to squeeze one into the 8x8 grid.
Azure Pipelines has been interesting to me especially given the generous free open source tier and seemingly instant availability of build agents. The setup is easy if you’re building .NET targets with lots of useful starters available.
The next stage is considering where to host the site and whether to use a content delivery network (CDN). My preferred approach on other sites has been to:
It’s hard to believe it was 13 years ago, back in a cold December on the little island of Guernsey, when I decided to start blogging. I’d had a static site with a few odd musings since 2000, but this was to be more regularly updated and with technical content. Blogspot seemed the easiest way to get started.
I’ve been messing around in the .NET ecosystem again, jumping back in with Azure Functions (similar to AWS Lambda) to get my blog onto 99% static hosting. I immediately ran into the API changes between v1 and v2 (currently in beta).
Now that I am again freelancing, I find myself solving unusual issues, many of which had no online solutions.
If you’re working with Spark Streaming, you might run into an interesting problem if you want to output an event based on multiple messages within a specific time period.
I’ve been using Mac OS X daily since 2001 when I purchased my Titanium PowerBook. I still can’t get used the Home and End key behaviour.
LINQ is a great tool for C# programmers letting you use familiar syntax with a variety of back-end systems without having to learn another language or paradigm for many query operations.
Examining the system fonts of the Sinclair QL, Memotech MTX512, Amstrad PCW, Acorn Archimedes and SAM Coupé.
I did it. Earlier this year I caved and purchased a MacBook Pro 15″ Retina after being Mac-less for a few months despite some reservations about the lack of upgrade options.
My eagerly-awaited Chromecast arrived a couple of weeks ago. Despite the reports that Google had run out of Netflix codes my 3-month streaming code arrived a few days before by email — a great deal given that it is also valid for current Netflix customers too.
Given my new focus on Windows 8 apps and the loss of my MacBook Pro I was in the market for a Windows 8 laptop.
Thanks should go to ScottOrange on the MSDN forums however it’s along thread that has lots of pieces to pick out and try.
It’s been almost a year since I bit the Windows Phone 7 bullet and put my iPhone 3G away. As a long-time Mac fan (our house is nothing but Macs) I wasn’t sure I’d last…
A number of people were requesting additional RSS feeds for the xbox.com web marketplace. (We had just one that included all new arrivals)
Just over three years ago I packed up my Guernsey life to come and work for Microsoft in Washington. I thought it might be fun to share some things I’ve learnt. This one is about transport.
Recently I needed to map external data into in-memory objects. In such scenarios the TryParse methods of Int and String are useful but where is Enum.TryParse? TryParse exists in .NET 4.0 but like a lot of people I’m on .NET 3.5.
ASP.NET MVC is the technology that brought me to Microsoft and the west-coast and it’s been fun getting to grips with it these last few weeks.
It’s been an interesting couple of years with nothing but a maxed-out MacBook Pro 17″ as my only home machine.
SQL Server like all databases goes through a number of steps when it receives a command. Besides parsing and validating the command text and parameters it looks at the database schema, statistics and indexes to come up with a plan to efficiently query or change your data.
You can view the plan SQL Server comes up with for a given query in SQL Management Studio by selecting Include Actual Execution Plan from the Query menu before running your query.
I fired up Visual Studio this evening to write a proof-of-concept app and found myself wanting strongly typed domain objects from a database but without the overhead of an object-relational mapper (the application is read-only).
A few short words to say I’ve put together a cheat sheet for LINQ to SQL with one page for C# and another for VB.NET.
It shows the syntax for a number of common query operations, manipulations and attributes and can be a very useful quick reference :)
A quick round-up of some useful LINQ to SQL related resources that are available for developers. I’ve not used everything on this list myself so don’t take this as personal endorsement.
A few more useful and lesser-known tips for using LINQ to SQL.
An improved version is now available.
One of the things I wanted my LINQ to SQL T4 templates to do was be able to split the output into a file-per-entity. Existing solutions used either a separate set of templates with duplicate code or intrusive handling code throughout the template. Here’s my helper class to abstract the problem away from what is already complicated enough template code.
One of the cool things about living in Seattle is the sheer number of passionate developers around. Whether you’re dropping into offices, heading across campus for lunch, meeting downtown for music and beer or, in my case, last month taking a Saturday out to participate in ALT.NET Seattle, there are ideas, enthusiasm and discussions with great developers to be had everywhere.
Started by Janet, picked up via Brad.
Computing history tells us of a mythical place where many of the innovations we take for granted today were either invented or refined to a working level at a single location known as the Xerox’s Palo-Alto Research Center (PARC).
These discoveries form the basis of much of the technology we use today and include the desktop metaphor, the graphical user interface, laser printers, object orientation and Ethernet.
In order that applications and operating systems shall not drive users insane, thou shall:
Me.com was up, briefly, just long enough for me to grab my usual handle and get the confirmation message in fact.
The word is out that Snow Leopard will be about trimming down Leopard — likely Apple’s effort to switch to lower-capacity solid-storage such as found in the MacBook Air and perhaps future iPhones and maybe a tablet.
Envy Code R preview 7.2 is released with many glyphs redrawn and a full complement of box-drawing characters.
Microsoft’s MVC for ASP.NET is still under serious development but at the moment support for localization is a little weak. Here’s one approach that works with the 04/16 source-drop.
Delicious Library is a DVD, game and book organization tool I’ve been using since my PowerBook G4 and a 2.0 version has been dangling from Wil Shipley’s mouth longer than I care to remember.
Windows users however will find Libra a very interesting clone and it features some of the same great features such as bar-code scanning via a web cam, tracking loans, a rendered virtual shelf and fast queries.
Tomorrow morning at 5am where I can enjoy an advanced fee scam! I’ve had these in email format before but never in my calendar…
The various Heroes Happen Here community events in the UK/USA to celebrate the launch of Visual Studio 2008 etc. made me envious that we don’t get such events and goodies here on the little island of Guernsey so I thought I’d so something about it!
Google just added support for AIM to Google Chat so you can just enter your login details and chat right away from your Gmail or Google Apps for Domains account as if they were Google Chat users.
I had to do a couple of ad-hoc Excel jobs today and found that whilst Excel has a VLookup function for spreadsheet/ranges it doesn’t have one for databases.
Many of the international delivery and courier companies subcontract to local Guernsey-based agents. If you are trying to find out where your package is (tracking sometimes stops in the UK), this list can be useful.
Microsoft have released the binary file format specifications to their Office suite (the XML ones are already published) under their Open Specification Promise.
Radio 4 covered the The Six Word Memoir competition, inspired by Earnest Hemingway’s wager he could tell a complete story in just six words. He deliciously delivered “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn” earning him $10.
An examination of Nuxt's content.db and how to shrink it for performance.
I created this stylish new 8x8 bitmap font after being inspired by a recent fully-scalable typeface called Melindrosa by Flavia Zimbardi — if you’re looking for a gorgeous new art deco font you should definitely check it out.
A new futuristic open face pruned back to the basics with isolated segments allowing them to be easily stencilled on the side of a space, air, land or sea craft — or just to save time etching or spraying.
Another new font this time with an old worn look that takes cues from ancient chiselled serif fonts while applying a hint of uncial hand lettering for a distinctly prophetic look!
As a child of the 80s I loved the Airwolf TV show with its gorgeous helicopter (a modified Bell 222A), on-board computers, synth intro music and lone wolf hero.
When I saw a remake of Manic Miner called Manic Person under development on the Spectrum Computing forums I thought a custom font would polish off the look.
A 2023 adaptation of DJR’s (David Jonathan Ross) fantastic Megascope font for April 2023.
I’ve always been fascinated by floppy disks from the crazy stories of Steve Wozniak designing the Disk II controller using a handful of logic chips and carefully-timed software to the amazing tricks to create — and break — copy protection recently popularised by 4am.
This is day 23 — the penultimate day — of my 2022 Advent of Fonts calendar and we have a 1920s art deco font with some serious serifs and some not so serious for a little character.
Here’s to day 17 of my 2023 Advent of Fonts calendar — a tribute to floppy disks and all the magnetic glory with letter shaped a little like sectors on a track. I’ve always been fascinated by copy protection and the tricks you can pull off on a supposedly pure digital medium to stop it being duplicated.
Day 11 of the 2022 Advent of Fonts sees this creation with tall narrow lower case and large flowing upper case that combine together to quite lovely effect.
An Advent of Fonts 2022 production for day 8. This font has been around on my drive for a while and I felt like it always needed a bit more attitude but there were no pixels left for it. On comparing it to the existing heavy fonts I have though it is different enough to stand apart and so here it is.
Day 5 of my Advent of Fonts for 2022 sees my take on the font everyone loves to hate, Comic Sans, with this cute 8x8 pixel adaptation named, appropriately, Comic Fans!
A 2022 escapee featuring massive characters that are trying to escape the confines of the 8x8 despite their thin rounded strokes. Corners and curves are over-plotted for a nice smooth look at high resolution or on CRT displays.
A late-2021 production originally intended for the 2021 Advent of Fonts polished off in 2022.
An original 2022 typeface for my Advent of Fonts inspired by thick felt-tip marker pens that stray into brush territory. Readability is good on LCD screens but some of the characters might be a bit too thick on a CRT display.
Fresh off the pixel editor for 2022 is this hard oblique segment-inspired font.
This was day 22 in my 2021 Advent of Fonts and an adaptation of the font from Amiga cracking group Skid Row with their magnetic readable blob (MOCR) bubble-letters and extended it to a full set of lower-case letters.
Day 16 of my 2021 Advent of Fonts saw Pristine released with a clean and a decayed version available.
Day 12 of my 2021 Advent of Fonts saw Punch released.
Day 4 in my 2021 Advent of Fonts saw the evolution of a distressed font that had been sitting around for a while. With some selective clean-up, angularization and limiting the distressing to the upper-case it came together nicely.
Webfonts are now ubiquitous across the web to the point where most of the big players even have their own typefaces and the web looks a lot better for it.
This mid-2021 typeface attempted to draw inspiration from the ZX Spectrum game Dragontorc by Steve Turner — a game I still have a copy of to this day but haven’t touched in 20+ years.
SEGA’s 1987 ninja-themed horizontal-scrolling arcade game Shinobi is quite the classic with its sharp visuals and responsive play.
This mid 2021 design originally came out of a refinement to an as-yet-unpublished “Delta” series of fonts intended for futuristic space-ship signage. Somehow it started taking on a life of it’s own picking up a few Inkscript flairs resulting in a font that’s kind of hard to put your finger on.
Anvil is a 2021 attempt to tackle the rustic, old-lettering but readable style made popular by many a Spectrum text adventure (without actually referencing it so as to avoid copying it).
A 2020–2021 production that started off as a CRT-specific font with exaggerated corners that would blur to provide some weight to them.
A May 2021 production that hasn’t been around too long based on the typography from the opening sequences of the phenomenal The Expanse TV-show.
Breaking changes are always work for your users. Work you are forcing them to do when they upgrade to your new version. They took a dependency on your library or software because it saved them time but now it’s costing them time.
I’m often digging into old bitmap font and UX design out of curiosity — and someday hope to revive a lot of these fonts in more modern formats using a pipeline similar to that for ZX Origins so we can get all the usable fonts, screenshots etc. out of them.
I thought I was done with clean sans-serif designs having done a fair few. Imagine my surprise that when reaching for a sans-serif I found none of them quite fit the design I was looking for. ZX OCR-B came close but felt a bit too narrow in places and had those very distinguishable marks. I turned to Carton which had the wrong flourishes, Plotter was closer in flourish but was too wide and the condensed version too forced. I wanted something that would feel more proportional and go with the extra spacing than stretching everything out — something a bit more like ZX Palm but not so narrow.
As everybody who has read my blog before knows, I love LINQ and miss it when coding in other languages, so it’s nice when I get a chance to use it again. When I come back to it with fresh eyes, I notice some things aren’t as easy as they should be — and this time is no exception.
A 2021 release of a design that had been sitting around for a while — at least since 2020 perhaps earlier — that never felt quite done or right. I eventually decided to just release the font anyway and in doing so tried to think of a name and decided that a spacey-name would be good which led to me remembering the Battlestar Galactica logo which has a similar theme.
A 2019 creation that managed to escape the _Incomplete folder in early 2020. It is aggressive, angular, and very tightly compressed.
A 2021 effort that started from a discussion on Twitter about 51 column text on the Spectrum. While 64 column is quite common (3 pixels + space), 42 also quite common (5 pixels + space) and of course the default of 32 (8 pixels + space) a few people have created 51 column routines such as Micro Print 85 and Handywide.
A fresh 2021 production of Baveuse by prolific type designer Raymond Larabie. This type is probably his most well known after being used for the titles in the animated TV show Archer.
Everyone has inspirations in their life that shape their idea of art, and Shadow of the Beast (2 specifically) was one of mine. Seeing that gorgeous artwork and the music that dynamically changed as you progressed through the area changed my opinion of what computers could do.
An end-of-year 2020 effort that started life as another attempt at the Protovision advert font from WarGames which I discovered is Serpentine. I did previously attempt it with my Reactor but I was never that happy with the oblique.
I must have encountered the joy of Synthwave music a year or two ago and it’s quite heavily dominated what I listen to each day as I code.
This font was sitting around in this finished state for many months. Normally fonts stick around because they need work but this one was because I kept wanting it to fit with another font or wait until I had another font to go with it to form a family. Neither happened, it just is its own thing.
Occasionally when working on a font, I’ll struggle with a specific glyph and push it in different ways to find something that works. Sometimes, the “very different” will lead to a font entirely on its own, which led to CannonFire.
The inspiration for this name, I believe, came from an advert for the QuickShot joystick. I can no longer find the source to confirm that.
This is a 2020 port of my previously proportional FontStruct font WarGames-OpenCredits which is based on the opening credits of the 1983 hacker movie WarGames.
This early 2020 typeface has sat around for far too long in the incomplete. As is often the case it felt like it needed something at the time but looking at it later revealed it’s already rather nice. Sometimes all it takes is fresh eyes and a reflection on the constraints.
In April 2020 Maxim from the Phantasy Star retranslation project reached out to see what could be done about the plain font in the Sega Master System game.
If I had a cent for every time I’ve gazed upon one of the original Macintosh fonts and felt inspired.
I designed this font in 2019 but didn’t polish it up until 2020. I’d held back expecting to create some different variant or for some other font to otherwise intersect into a typeface but it never happened.
I’ve covered the Shadow of the Beast influences with Razor (like the Psygnosis logo) and Beastly (in-game titles and font style) and so this one draws inspiration from the box-art logos which are, I believe, by Roger Dean. Flowing arches, sharp cliffs, and vibrant gradient skies all adorn his alien landscapes and these themes are used to great extent in the custom lettering of his logos as well.
Artist II is the art program that got me hooked on creating fonts with its built-in font editor. I picked it up in a bundle with a mouse and interface from Datel in the 80s and could barely put it down. Artist II came with a few fonts — a bold font, a futuristic font, and most interestingly, a Blackletter/Old English font that amazed me for so many years to come.
It’s 1995, and a wiry-looking engineer in need of a haircut is working at a tech services company in the Channel Islands. The island is Jersey (you can see the French coastline on a clear day), and he’s over here for a week or two for training from his nearby Guernsey home.
This company does everything from IBM AS/400 maintenance to custom PC software development — the developer involved was brought in and trained to work on a banking package on those AS/400s but has ended up on the PC development side through a series of improbable events.
I ran into the FF Maverick on signage at Science World in Vancouver and had to take a photo of for later identification.
A 2006 production that shipped with BASIN back then but was overlooked in the ZX Origins project.
This 2020 font takes inspiration from Defender of the Crown on the Amiga. I’d created a TrueType version of reproduction of that a while back.
I designed this font in 2019 in BASIN as a fun straight-edge almost-chiseled feel with corners that keep on going and generous serifs.
I started designing fonts around 1987 on an 8-bit Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Many years later, my involvement in the Spectrum emulation scene led aul Dunn to ask me if I could provide fonts for his excellent BASIN Sinclair BASIC for Windows. My interest in 8x8 fonts was suitably rekindled, and I ended up delivering about 60 — some even extracted from my original +3 disk images.
Adrian Frutiger designed OCR-B for Monotype in 1968 as a more human-friendly alternative to OCR-A now that machines were getting better at optical character recognition. It can still be found today on the bottom of bar codes and the machine-readable part of passports.
ITC Bauhaus is a 1975 design by Ed Benguiat and Victor Caruso, inspired by the ideas of Bauhaus.
I designed this font in 2019 in BASIN as a very bold and angular font.
I created this font in 2018, although I’ve forgotten the inspiration entirely. A bold style variant was added in 2020.
I drew this font sometime around 2006 for BASIN, initially named Cinemax before discovering it was a trademark. So here it is back again with a much more generic name.
I designed this font back in 2006 in BASIN as a tribute to advertisements for computers in the late 60s and early 70s. Alternative weights were later added but I forget when.
I designed this font in 2005 with the unoriginal name Top Heavy Bold. It is re-released here under the name Crews.
I designed this font some time back in the 90s using Artist II as a tribute to the font used by Datel Electronics on their products and ads (they used something less extreme by the time they became a 16-bit Action Replay only shop).
This design started with trying specific diamond shapes but soon took on more irregularity to deal with the size constraints. When combined with the lower-case characters not joining up the counters, it took on a rough unpolished look, evoking old-time adventure.
I created this font in 2006 as a resource for the BASIN development tool.
I created this font in 2018 as a variation of Envious that featured serifs as an attempt to fill some of the extra white-space and provide a complimentary serif for games that wanted to mix the formal and informal.
I designed this font in 2018 in BASIN drawing inspiration from my memory of Mortal Kombat (hence the name).
I do not recall where the inspiration for this one came from nor exactly when it was created, I suspect 2018.
I designed this font in 2019 using BASIN as an interpretation of the circa-1965 font ‘Gemini Computer’.
A 2019 creation designed in BASIN for anything wanting a clean flowing italic font.
Another 2018 design this time a more formal hand font that still has some personality yet isn’t as flowing. Perhaps an official log or record of events.
This font was designed using FontStruct in 2008 as an attempt to create a very clean and easy-to-read system font that was 5 pixels wide. It is very generic looking with just one extra feature being the strong inner curves on “bdpqgyhn”. This helped with ZX Spectrum conversion where vertical height was limited to 8 pixels and the descenders were shaved down 1 pixel.
A design of mine for BASIN in 2005 where the name defined the font. I was naming fonts after some members of the Sinclair Spectrum emulation scene and the surname Needle inspired “Needlecast” — a technique for transferring consciousness from sci-fi novel Altered Carbon.
I designed this font in 2019 using BASIN as a tribute to 80s NASA and the typography that adorned the iconic Space Shuttle.
Another 2005–2007 creation for the BASIN development tool, this time with a racing feel.
As a child, I had terrible handwriting, and so I was drawn to the flatbed plotter at my school that would grasp a pen and then precisely draw gorgeously legible letters. I designed this font back in the 80s in The Artist II on my Spectrum +3 as a tribute to that device — our school’s PlotMate attached to a BBC Micro.
The font is a fresh creation from 2020 that started as playing with one letter in another font that ended up going in a different direction, then splitting the font off and redoing all the other glyphs in the new style. That tends to happen quite a lot these days.
Inspired by the Psygnosis logo from Amiga games of old as well as some of the title typography from the gorgeous Shadow of the Beast II this font came out surprisingly well given the constraints.
This typeface is a 2019 BASIN production exploring the gap between my hand-written (Journey, Marais, Homestead) and humanist-sans (Envious, Magic 5) fonts. As my hand-writing is somewhat of a print, this resonated well with me, and I was pleased with the result.
A 2020 design with a hard-edge get-it-done attitude and momentum. The fact it looks like it could be stamped into sheets of aluminium is a bonus.
I created this font around 2006 for BASIN as a throwback to another 80s kid toy — the Etch-a-Sketch. A bold was added in 2019.
A 2018 creation designed in BASIN for games that want an aggressive angular appearance often associated with motor-sports and other such events.
I designed this font in 2006 for BASIN as an attempt to do a font with stars, and sparkle. Instead it became a 1920s-style Broadway font as if it was illuminated by light bulbs. Oh well, stars of a different kind.
A fresh font created in 2019 inspired by the chaotic typography of games like Day of the Tentacle purely from memory. The actual in-game font is quite different so once again this font takes on a life of its own. A bold was added in 2020.
A 2006 BASIN creation that’s unashamedly bold and a little reminiscent of many a cover tape back in the day.
This typeface is a 2019 BASIN production with a fast, aggressive angular style suitable for racing games.
Susan Kare’s iconic Chicago shipped with the original Apple Macintosh in 1984 and was the standard system font until MacOS8 replaced it with the TrueType Charcoal look-alike. It did receive a dust-off in 2001 to become the primary font on the newly launched iPod range.
I created this font in 2005 as my take on an existing bitmap font by legendary designer Susan Kare (of MacOS, Chicago, etc.) called Ramona.
I created this font in 2019 using BASIN based upon the System X3 font by Paul Prue. It takes the magnetic ‘bump’ concept and shifts it to unusual places with extra dots and unexpected curves and lines. The result is something quite aggressive and bold.
Damien Guard (“us”, “we”, or “our”) operates the https://damieng.com website (the “Service”).
Jekyll does support categories and tags directly but doesn’t support the pagination of categories and tag list pages. The Paginate-v2 gem does solve this — and also lets you tweak the URL format.
The model binding mechanism in ASP.NET is pretty slick — it’s highly extensible and built on TypeDescriptor for re-use that lets you avoid writing boilerplate code to map between CLR objects and their web representations.
Working on Atom lately, I need to be able to download files to disk. We have ways to achieve this, but they do not show the download progress. This leads to confusion and sometimes frustration on larger downloads such as updates or large packages.
As somebody who runs a few sites, I like to keep an eye on them and make sure they’re up and responding correctly.
If you’re coming from an ORM background to Azure Table Storage, you might be wondering how to map class hierarchies to tables.
Recent casualties were my Apple ][e (no disks), Acorn ARM (wouldn’t boot) and Commodore VIC 20 (poor state). Next up is my Acorn BBC Micro B:
My “Beeb” is in good condition and works well, but the case screws have long since disappeared (a common theme in my collection), and it needed a good clean. These older mechanical keyboards attract dust and dirt.
At $25 a year the iTunes Match service can be a little tough to swallow given all it does is synchronize your music across iTunes especially when other file-sharing services are cheaper and more general purpose (OneDrive, Mega, DropBox etc).
There are so many useful debugging features built into Visual Studio that aren’t well-known. Here are a few of my favourites, including some recent finds in VS 2013.
C# 6.0 is now available and the final list of features is well explained by Sunny Ahuwanya so go there and try it with his interactive samples page.
Adam Ralph has a list of the probable C# 6.0 features Mads Torgersen from the C# design team covered at new Developers Conference() NDC 2013 in London.
What's it like working at Microsoft? Well, like all places there's good and bad and Microsoft is so large no two teams are quite alike...
There’s something entrancing about the pixel. Square and elegant and when pushed by the right people they can form beautiful art, stunning animations and gorgeously crisp text.
With Windows 8 right around the corner it’s time to build a new desktop PC that will scream for both development and gaming.
Having set a personal budget of around $1500 I started the arduous process that every DIY PC builder has gone through… researching parts and playing with specifications until it feels just right.
People are always surprised when they hear you’re interested in typography. The appreciation and interest in the shape of letters and symbols is definitely a little more unusual to find as a hobby but it’s actually quite fun!
A look at the system fonts of 16-bit machines including the IBM CGA & VGA Adapters, Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, and Atari ST.
It’s been a few weeks since I took up Microsoft’s employee offer of a free Windows Phone 7 (when you renew a 2 year contract) and combined it with AT&T’s offer of buy-one-get-one-free for my wife.
Working on the .NET Framework was an interesting but often difficult time, especially when dealing with vague or incomprehensible bug reports.
I wanted an SSD for some time and finally caved in. Armed with credit card, screwdriver and trusty MacBook Pro I fitted a sweet SSD and decided to document the experience.
Another set of useful and lesser-known LINQ to SQL techniques.
My multiple outputs from t4 made easy post contained a class making it easy to produce multiple files from Visual Studio’s text templating engine (T4).
For some time I’ve wanted to refresh the design here at damieng.com which evolved out of the Redoable theme with my own tweaks to colors, typography, images and background until it was almost my own.
The design of a Dictionary<T> lends itself well to a caching or identification mechanism and as a result you often see code that looks like this:
People have been asking via Twitter and the LINQ to SQL forums so here’s a list I put together on a number of the changes made for 4.0.
Being on the inside of a product team often leads to uncovering or stumbling upon lesser-known techniques, and here are a few little nuggets I found interesting — I have more if there is interest.
My templates that allow you to customize the LINQ to SQL code-generation process (normally performed by SQLMetal/LINQ to SQL classes designer) have been updated once again.
There has been a flurry of posts and comments in the last 24 hours over the future of LINQ to SQL so I thought it would be interesting to provide some information on what the LINQ to SQL team have been up to and what we’re working on for .NET Framework 4.0.
A newer version of this LINQ to SQL template is available.
If you want to customize the LINQ to SQL code generation phase in your project without additional tool dependencies this could be what you’re looking for.
I’m missing my DVD collection terribly and might just give in and get it shipped over now I have a Pioneer DVD player that can play region 2 titles here albeit with a poor interlace PAL > NTSC conversion.
The Log property on a LINQ to SQL data context takes a TextWriter and streams out details of the SQL statements and parameters that are being generated and sent to the server.
I don’t normally republish my Tweets but are my highlights.
A newer version of this LINQ to SQL template is available
While SQLMetal does a good job of turning your SQL schema into a set of classes for you it doesn’t let you customize the code generation process.
Apple are opening an Apple Store here in Vancouver, BC tomorrow at 10:00am.
Apple have released Boot Camp 2.1 which finally includes official 64-bit support on Vista and support for Windows XP Service Pack 3.
This update may mean that 3D games will play without locking up or installing Nvidia’s own drivers and that the track-pad functions correctly again (broken since Boot Camp 1.x)
Work on my Envy Code R programming font has resumed and I’ve spent hours playing with the hinting process to ensure it looks good at sizes above and below 10 point:
A troublesome disk (a story for another time) has forced me to reinstall my MacBook Pro and review my Windows partition.
Safari 3.1 has just been released and besides the partial CSS3 (fonts) and partial HTML5 (media tags, off-line storage) support there are some new developer tools included.
Apple’s iPhone SDK is now available in beta format for free download (running your apps on a real iPhone is a one-time $99 charge).
I have a few reference pages here — some still maintained others long since past their best.
My good friend Steve Streeting is giving a talk about the Hibernate object-relational mapper at the Guernsey Software Developer Forum tomorrow night. Hibernate is a very successful ORM for Java which has been ported to .NET under the moniker NHibernate.
My Humane theme for Visual Studio is getting a fair bit of traffic today courtesy of Scott Hanselman. Given I have been messing with Mac development lately I thought it was worth porting to TextMate and Xcode 3.
Long-time friend, fellow co-host of the GSDF and the coding genius behind the open-source Ogre3D engine Steve Streeting has written an interesting piece on Open source adoption; countering the fear and doubt. I have no doubt that this was fueled by a lengthy discussion last night in the Ship & Crown pub — a common ritual after our GSDF meetings.
In this article I'll show you how to use AWS Lambda to send an email with Brevo using their API while being protected by reCAPTCHA.
Early PC video cards featured a familiar serif 8x8 font. Over the years different manufactures tweaked a few glyphs (ATI), made a serif version (Amstrad), or just plain stylized parts (AMI & Phoenix BIOS) all of which gave a slightly off-brand feel.
A classy yet fun new typeface with a high contrast x-bar and large rounded edges.
This new font was inspired as being the counterpoint to my Protractor font that featured straight lines and harsh angles and instead takes broad rounded strokes as far as they can be squeezed in!
Thick heavy fonts with cut-outs and stylized edges aren’t new in the world of typography gracing everything from TRON to AfterBurner and beyond but this new alternate take on the style with a real lower-case should bring polish to any space game.
A number of years back I switched to a static site generator for damieng.com, firstly with Jekyll, and then with Nuxt when I wanted more flexibility. I’ve been happy with the results and the site is now faster, cheaper, more secure and easier for me to maintain.
The tricky part was allowing user comments without a third-party service like Disqus. I came up with a solution that has comments into markdown files just like the rest of the site content so they can be published as part of the build process.
Recently Kevin Edwards got hold of some 3″ disks containing source code to various old commercial games. He imaged them with the Kryoflux flux-level imager (Greaseweazle and FluxEngine are also good options). These tools produce highly accurate images of magnetic media that rips through copy protection and format concerns even allowing you to write the image back to disk with that in tact. This level of detail emits large files — 11.7MB for a single-sided Spectrum disk that normally holds 173KB is quite typical. 4KB data tracks happily turn into 215KB flux.
I’ve been using Nuxt2 quite a bit for my sites (including this one) and am now starting to use Nuxt3 for a few new ones and am finding the docs lacking in many places or confusing in others so hope to post a few more tips in the coming weeks.
My 2022 Advent of Fonts hits the final stretch with day 21 and this smart, oblique all-caps that features left-tick/serifs on the capitals only to give it a more kinetic feel. I’m quite happy how different this is from the other ~400 or so fonts in the ZX Origins collection so far.
Advent of Font 2022’s day 15 sees this italic serif handwritten font take to the stage. Italics are uncommon on handwriting styles but why not — after all I need to mix it up!
Through December 2022 I again produced a 24-day advent calendar of 8x8 pixel fonts this time primarily on Mastodon.
An original font for day 7 of my 2022 Advent of Fonts calendar gifts. What we have here is a art-deco inspired font that drops the heavy single wide-stroke verticals traditional to fonts of this period and instead throws in some unexpected angles and some bar overshoot.
A December 2022 Advent of Fonts entry that pushes the capitals crossbar right up while introducing the odd serif-like flourish.
Writing creating computer software is my passion in life and I’ve been lucky to work on some incredible projects and technologies over the years.
One of the very few 2022 productions this is a tiny yet heavy and friendly font for use on space-constrained screens with a proportional renderer or where you just want a more unique look with plentiful letter-spacing.
A 2021 typeface inspired by the digital dash typography from the Peugeot 208-E although I’ve not been able to track down the exact font (it’s not their rather nice custom house Peugeot font). It is a nice intersection between sharp lines and soft edges with nice wide glyphs.
My first release of 2021 started off as an attempt to tackle the italic version of DJR’s Extendomatic but I really wanted to do something different with the lower-case and so it took on it’s own life.
Day 21 in my 2021 Advent of Fonts is Conveyance, a neat hand-written style typeface with tiny lower-case letters with towering ascenders.
Day 16 of my 2021 Advent of Fonts saw the public release of a custom version of ZX Maverick I created for a text adventure I was working on called A Night in Tokyo.
Day 9 of my 2021 Advent of Fonts saw Caprica released.
Day 7 in my 2021 Advent of Fonts saw me take on a new typeface in the style of the Far Cry logo.
This was the second font in my 2021 Advent of Fonts and a new angular take on sci-fi type.
Sacrificing the descender and re-working the glyphs that use them has opened up some extra possibilities I’ve explored a little with previous typefaces.
This privacy notice for Damien Guard (’we‘, ’us‘, or ’our‘), describes how and why we might collect, store, use, and/or share (’process‘) your information when you use our services (’Services‘), such as when you:
I mid-2021 design that goes for a lighter touch than my other serifs and instead allows for more whitespace. The complementary bold font uses the internal space to keep that relaxed external whitespace and providing a compressed look.
A 2021 production that sees an adaptation of an adaptation — specifically this is an adaptation of Raymond Larabie’s Rustproof Body — itself an adaptation of the distinctive lettering that adorned the back of everyone’s favourite 1980s time machine — the DeLorean DMC-12.
A 2021 adaptation of the gorgeous Extraordinaire variable font by type designer David Jonathan Ross. A semi-bold was added in 2024.
A 2021 alternative-take on the 80s-flavoured NASA-style typography. Unlike previous typefaces in this style (see Also Consider) this one takes a softer and more rounded approach on the upper-case and a more traditional humanist look on the lower-case.
A 2021 production taking the concept of a magnetic-character-recognition style and making it incredibly small. The bottom-heavy magnetic elements also give it a weight reminiscent of 80s chrome as well.
Up to this point all my sans fonts — well most of my fonts at all really — have used at most 6 vertical pixels for the x-height and typically only 5 pixels. This is because you need a row for the space and then another row for the dot on the i and then another for descenders.
A 2021 font constrained to 5-pixels wide with angles, attitude and overhanging curves and 26 of those dashing small-caps.
Runes predate our Latin based alphabet and directly informed and influenced it in many ways. Many of the earlier ones are not too recognizable but taking the Anglo-Saxon runes and a bunch of liberties.
A fresh 2021 production that draws inspiration from styles of lettering often used in dark and horror-themed environments.
Winterforge is a sharp, short, aggressive style drawn in 2021 that would work well for short runs of text in a fantasy adventure scenario.
A 2018 digital take on the District font that started as just one variant but as the other styles of District grew it made more sense to split it out into its own so it could get bold, outline, and bold outline variants without making the former typeface collection too large.
A 2021 release of a type that’s been sitting around a little while — from at least mid 2020.
So back in 2006 I created First Pass as a messy font that I would refine into a second pass but couldn’t pull it off. Here I am in 2020 and I tried the experiment again from scratch this time drawing with the mouse in a single pass and then just moving a couple of pixels if needed.
This 2020 BASIN production started as a discussion with Oli Wilkinson. He’s working on a Red Dwarf game for the Spectrum. Anyone into fonts who watches Red Dwarf (probably all 4 of us) know, Eurostile is heavily-featured throughout the show, from signage to branded Jupiter Mining Corporation goods (in ALL CAPS).
Stepper motors are fascinating devices and not just because they control floppy drives. Anyhow here’s a 2020 BASIN production that has lots of steps all over the angles on a font.
A 2020 exploration into old-style hand-scripts such as you’d find in Lord of the Rings or Dungeons & Dragons.
This font started life as a conversion of the 1973 Wang 2200 minicomputer bitmap font. What surprised me was how it relied on the phosphor glow to give a nice effect despite being laden with gaps. This is really how all good fonts are designed — by modifying the input so the actual output on a real environment looks optimal.
I’ve been a big fan of static site generation since I switched from WordPress to Jekyll back in 2018. I’m also a big fan of learning new technologies as they come along, and now GitHub Actions are out in the wild; I thought this would be an opportunity to see how I can port my existing custom CircleCI build to Jekyll.
This is my third attempt at a western wilderness woodblock font and it turned out quite well with the big blocky serifs. A bold version increases the vertical stroke which reduces the impact of the serif and removes some of the overshoot on horizontal strokes as there are, alas, no pixels left.
I designed this font in 2020 as a tribute to the DALEK font used in the 1964 Dr. Who tie-in Dalek Book. The font rose in popularity, with Caesar’s Palace adopting it for their logo sometime later. The DALEK font did not include a lower-case, so I improvised there based on the cues in the upper case and numerics.
I’ve recently been working on a full HTML5 conversion of the Sinclair Spectrum +3 manual with full canvas-drawn screenshots and diagrams for smooth scaling/high res displays as well as some close font matching and layout as well as cross-reference links all over the place.
Another 2020 started-and-published font that came from getting into the feel of the 1930s watching Hercule Poirot.
This is a recent attempt to take a hand-flowing form and make it look elegant and precise — as if it was written by a scribe. (The font I previously called Scribe was renamed to Parchment as it’s far too haphazard for such a name).
Formula 1 is a fantastic exhilarating sport and I was very much a fan in my youth. Seeing the Formula 1 docudrama on Netflix with my kids got us into it again and I very much appreciated their latest logo and typeface.
This font has been sitting in my incomplete folder for probably well over a year. I couldn’t decide what to do with it. It looks different enough from my other fonts but is also quite inconsistent. Attempts at making it more consistent resulted in a complete loss of flavor.
If you’ve built a PC desktop in the last few years, you’ve probably been exposed to the confusing array of DDR4 information when it comes to buying RAM.
What it comes down to is not all RAM is created equal. Once you get past pin size and memory capacity, you’ll have to filter down by speed. Speed isn’t a simple one-figure number — you may see a rated speed like 2400MHz, but you may also see another bunch of numbers like 16–16–16–39 indicating the necessary clock cycles to perform certain types of memory operations.
Semantic versioning is a simple agreement on how packages should be versioned.
Semantic versioning (SemVer) gives package developers a framework to version their software and provides consumers of packages an expectation of how changes will be handled over time.
Created in mid-2019 as a different take on a serif font that exploits the full width and some additional flourishes.
I started these fonts in 2018 as very separate creations with different names. As I refined a couple of them, they started to fit better together, and I eventually decided to unify them into a single set.
I created this font in 2019 in BASIN as an adaptation of the ITC Benguiat typeface. A bold weight was added in 2022.
Trouble is a recent 2019 design the blends the bottom-heavy style of Beachball and friendliness with some of the punch and angularity of Vertigo for something less chaotic and still fun.
A 2018 production that attempts to be a real oblique font (not italicized) straddle the intersection of being easy to read and yet not too playful.
I created this font in 2018 as a bubbly, fun font that somehow reminded me of playing on the beach with friends. A short version was added in 2020 that keeps much of the original feel while dealing with descenders and vertical spacing a bit better.
I designed this font in 2006 for BASIN as Broadway and later renamed it Broadwary after finding out a font was already called Broadway created in 1927, although they are quite a bit different.
I created this font around 2006 as a resource for the BASIN development tool.
I drew these fonts back in the day, and I’m not sure I ever published them before, probably because the limitations of 4 pixel wide fonts mean that you don’t get much originality. There are plenty of other fonts out there like this, including the Spectrum Tasword font as well as Screen-80 and Highspeed80
I love observing typography in the real world and building signage is one of my favorites with a special place for Neutra, Clarendon, and Century Gothic.
On reviewing many of the fonts for publication as part of my ZX Origins collection I noticed a dearth of softer fonts and Cushion is an attempt to address that.
Another font I created for the BASIN package around 2006 specifically designed with wilderness adventure games in mind.
There are times when designing a font you just doodle a few characters and it flows through to define the rest of the font. Egyptian Mercy is one of these that I thought up in 2006 and was original enough that I’d spend hours trying to come up with a real TrueType scalable version — an effort that got nowhere once the realization came that the charm and effect derived entirely from square pixels.
My Envy Code R font has been quite popular and its history goes back through Envy Code B and A bitmap fonts… right back to my Plotter font on the Sinclair Spectrum.
I created this font in 2018 as a tribute to the 80s game publisher Firebird.
I created this font in 2018 after deciding to try once again with hand-written script fonts — one of the styles I’ve struggled with.
I designed this font in 2019 as a bold italic serif which is a tricky combination given the 8x8 limitation.
I designed this font in 2018 initially as a rectangular version of the 1920s Cinema but it quickly took on a feel of its own and with some narrowing of the glyphs and alternative flair switched style completely and detached from the past entirely.
I designed this font in 2019 and for a moment I thought I had re-created Rosand but while both have those tight corners and interesting gaps they don’t share much else in common and so here it is as a separate typeface.
I designed this font back in the late 80s on the Spectrum using Artist II and this ‘futuristic’ style has long been a staple of games and is one of the more generic-looking magnetic-reader influenced types.
I originally designed Nicety back in 2006 for the BASIN package as a resource for authors but felt the need to polish it up somewhat with all new semi-bold and bold variants in 2018 in preparation for ZX Origins.
A font I think I started in 2018 and wrapped up in 2019. It certainly shares some similarities with others but has enough uniqueness that once placed on a screenshot things look quite different.
I designed this font around 2006 as a resource for the BASIN development tool, inspired by the Harmonix font.
Another 2019 creation this has been sitting in the _Incomplete folder in one form or another it could be older. I believe Precinct 90 was the original the others fonts were based upon, the 90 referring to the right-angled corner that was removed, the 180 referring to two corners shaved and the 0 leaving it square on all corners.
I designed this font in 2018 in BASIN as an experiment.
A 2020 creation for a very bold square oblique font reminiscent of many a computer and games advertisement in the 90s once the 70s magnetic-OCR styles just couldn’t cut it any longer. A very similar typeface adorned the Protovision advert that was the story catalyst in the movie WarGames.
I drew this font in 2019 using BASIN. It is inspired by block-printed Wanted Posters of the Wild West that were later codified in the 1938 font PlayBill. Of all the 8x8 fonts I’ve created this was one of the most frustrating. Trying to get the essence of large blocky serifs into a space that just didn’t allow it was challenging. A “short” variant was added in 2022.
I drew these fonts in 2018 and 2019 using BASIN. They are inspired by the cracking intros and tools from the Commodore Amiga ‘Warez’ scenes of the 90s.
I created this font in 2018 as a tribute to the Star Wars logo.
This font has been an off-and-on for a few years. Stencil fonts are tough in 8x8 and although they’re quite common in military and combat games they’re often not that good. It’s difficult to be consistent and readable plus many of them entirely skip the lower case.
I created this font in 2019 using BASIN, and it is somewhat of an intersection between Needlecast (low height), Orbiter (open counters) and Datel Tribute (incomplete strokes).
I designed this font in 2018 in an attempt to create a much simpler serif font trading angles and strong serifs for more relaxed spacing.
A late 2020 BASIN production inspired by the aggressive typeface found on tuner cars and logos with cut-outs and an almost stencil bold look.
This typeface is a 2019 design taking inspiration from the posters of 60s movies like Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It has a lot of energy, chaos, and a dash of datedness from the simply woodblock-like structure.
Commissioned by IBM in 1955 for use on their typewriters, Courier soon became a de-facto standard on typewriters and screenplays. It successfully made the jump to graphical user interfaces with the advent of TrueType after a slow start as a bitmap font.
SEMI is an OCR font designed by SEMI.ORG for use in character recognition on printed circuit boards in 2006.
The Times New Roman typeface is ubiquitous, being default fonts installed on pretty much every platform under the sun.
It’s been a while since I blogged about Revitalizing my BBC Micro. In that time, I’ve performed a few upgrades readers might find interesting.
As useful as the tiny Amstrad CRT was, I wanted something bigger, brighter, and sharper. LCD is terrible for retro systems with blurry scaling attempting to draw images designed to take advantage of CRTs. Emulator authors spend significant effort trying to mimic CRT effects for an authentic retro feel — but the best option is to use a CRT.
Site search is a feature that WordPress got right. Analytics also tells me it is popular. A static site is at a disadvantage, but we have some options to address that.
I’ve been working on porting over my blog to a static site generator. I fired up an Azure Function to handle the form-comment to PR process to enable user comments to still be part of the site without using a 3rd party commenting system — more on that in the next post — and found the ASP.NET model binding for form posts distinctly lacking.
Examining the system fonts of the TRS-80 Color Computer, Dragon, Tatung Einstein, Commodore 128, Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, and Oric Atmos.
Here are my notes from today’s event by renowned statistician Edward Tufte — author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisaging Information primarily for my own reference but perhaps of interest to others.
No announcement, no preamble. The lights went out, and a visually striking video showing a representation of music started. Conversations were immediately hushed, and devices put away. An effective technique to get attention and signal an absolute start.
Troy Hunt put together a list of top Australian banks and their SSL rating using the Qualys SSL Server Test that reveals the somewhat depressing state of SSL security of various banks down-under.
I’ve been learning Scala and decided to put together a C# to Scala cheat sheet. All is going pretty well but then I got stuck on the equivalent of Average.
Virtual machines are called Droplets at Digital Ocean so hit Create then:
There is a fair amount of info on making and publishing NuGet packages but I couldn’t find a simplified guide for the simple case. Here it is and start by downloading nuget.exe and putting it in your path.
Many full-size Windows keyboards come with extra buttons some of which are of questionable value but the volume and music controls are useful especially if you’re a programmer that likes to listen to music all day.
One of the great things about working for Microsoft was the sheer breadth of the company means there are lots of cool and interesting things going on that you can peek into even if it’s not your area.
Here’s a few unusual things about C# that few C# developers seem to know about.
Several years ago I worked on a payroll package developing a core engine that required an API to let third parties write calculations, validations and security gates that would execute as part of its regular operation.
Google have switched system font for Android’s latest release (known as Ice Cream Sandwich) from the Droid Family to a new typeface known as Roboto.
Examining the system fonts of the Commodore PET, Apple ][, Atari 400/800, Acorn BBC Micro, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, and MSX.
It’s been quite a while since xbox.com had a major update and today sees the launch of the new version with a clean new look and a whole host of new features that our teams here at LIVE engagement have been working on.
It’s quite common that when you issue a query you’re going to want to join some additional tables.
The Visual Studio Gallery is already home to 533 tools, controls and templates for VS 2010 and this number is sure to grow once VS 2010 hits RTM and people get to grips with the extendable new editor.
From an earliest memory of a cream colored box emblazoned with letters, mostly black — some red, came an owl proclaiming allegiance to the BBC.
This page is a summary of DamienG.com — you can also read a specific Privacy Policy as well as Terms & Conditions.
I came home from work today to find my family pack upgrade version of Snow Leopard. It’s been a few hours, so here are impressions so far.
David Fowler on the ASP.NET team and I have been bouncing ideas about how to solve an annoyance using LINQ:
Taking my bitmap font Envy Code B into the vector TrueType Envy Code R was a long process, the most difficult being hinting.
We’ve all heard of BDD, DDD and TDD but that still leaves 23 letters unaccounted for.
A question I see from time-to-time on LINQ to SQL relates to changing an entity’s class.
Like many other MacBook Pro owners I’ve been waiting for the October 14th event with some excitement. The highlights include:
A couple of weeks ago I ordered the latest third-generation of the DAS Keyboard — my second generation packed away back in Guernsey and the Alps-switched one from DSI incapable of reliably registering more than 2 keys on USB.
Ken Egozi tagged me with the latest meme and this time it’s at least relevant :)
The topic of modifying the code generation phase of LINQ to SQL comes up quite often and the limited T4 template I published here last month was good at showing the potential but wasn’t a practical replacement for the code generation phase.
The guys over on the AnkhSVN team have acquired new members and burnt the midnight oil to deliver a great 2.0 release with:
On Saturday an explosion at ISP ThePlanet took this site offline and it remained like that for 48 hours whilst power and structure were restored to the 4,000+ affected servers.
I am now settled into my new, albeit temporary, apartment here in Vancouver, BC working for Microsoft!
It’s been a few weeks since I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 and whilst the upgrade went well it hasn’t been all plain sailing.
I later expanded this out into a full Enum<T> strongly typed helper.
I can’t be the only person in the world who wants to foreach over the values of an enum otherwise Enum.GetValues(Type enumType) wouldn’t exist in the framework. Alas it didn’t get any generics love in .NET 2.0 and unhelpfully returns an array.
I’ve been quiet on my blog lately largely because I have been preparing to change job and relocate half-way around the world to Vancouver in the beautiful province of British Columbia (where I spent my 2004 summer holiday).
I’ve been having some problems trying to locate friends on Facebook and now I know why.
AnkhSVN 2.0 is now out with the majority of these features making the cut!
Now that AnkhSVN 1.0.3 is out with support for Visual Studio 2008 we can discuss our future plans for AnkhSVN.
I have previously maintained three Frequently Asked Questions and Answers (FAQs) on the following subjects:
Guernsey is where I have spent most of my life and is woefully under-represented on the Internet.
Rob Conery got me thinking about web site maintenance and I put forward a brief comment on the two distinct types and how Visual Studio handles them which I have expanded upon here.
This evening’s presentation on Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is now available from my appearances page.