Egyptian Mercy

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.

In typography terms, Egyptian has a specific meaning — one that I’ve completely ignored here in favor of the more common idea of hieroglyphics with crazy square spirals and triangles standing in for circles to give it also a futuristic feel. It mostly reminds me of the architectural details in Deckard’s apartment in Blade Runner.

It works very well for unique looking titles, menus, and pop-ups but you’d been hurting players if you tried to set a whole text adventure in this.