Byteletter

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.

In 2019 I thought I’d try designing a blackletter, specifically the Textura style. I intentionally avoided looking at the “Old English” one from The Artist II to avoid similarities, and I’m glad I did. While that font had narrow non-bold lower-case, mine takes on a thicker, more stand-out style. Both fonts struggle to get the necessary curves and flourishes in the capitals, but with only 8x8 pixels, your options are limited. Along the way, I tried an alternative style which resulted in Scribe.

This font works pretty well for runs of text and prose but avoids using capital letters next to each other as the density can turn it into something quite incomprehensible.