Pixel perfect

Who would have thought that the subject of this book, extracted from an incredibly thin seam of the typographic coalface, could prove so interesting. Toshi Omagari writes with enthusiasm and technical knowledge (he works for Monotype) about historic arcade game type. None of the typefaces in the book existed outside of a digital screen so there are none of the usual type attributes like point sizes, leading, alternate characters, small caps et cetera. With these faces it's all down to an eight pixel square box but within this very tight limitation some very creative ideas have flourished.

The ten chapters on typefaces have plenty of complete alphabets plus numbers to show how clever some of the letters are though the three Sans chapters (Regular, Bold and Light) with letters like E,F,H,I, L and T with no curves obviously stand out from other letters that have curves, this was solved by adding graduated colour pixels, partial or full drop shadows and thick or thin outlines to the letters and in the case if a capital I adding a block serif top and bottom to make fill out a square like other letters. The basis for so many of these alphabets was an Atari font, probably created by Lyle Rains sometime in the late Seventies.

Lower case letters in most of the fonts are a real challenge and really so many of these letters end up as being almost unreadable. The chapter on Slanted (or italic) faces reveals some clever ideas for those characters that are basically straight, now they have to have a pixel added here and there to suggest a leaning letter. Page 184 has an alphabet for the 1987 Shinobi game with not only italics but in a sort of script. Luckily the eye reads complete words rather than individual characters.

The book is basically visual with its dozens of coloured alphabets, some of which are enlarged to fill a spread so it's possible to study how the characters have been made up in the eight pixel grid and I doubt they have ever been seen as big as this. A nice touch, here and there, are screen grabs of some games showing how the various type faces work as real words. Omagari's book covers an incredibly tiny corner of the typographic world but its excellent design and interesting words make the subject a worthwhile read (especially for typographers).