Spryte

Pixel Font

2023

Jonny Gibson

Single style

1.0

Basic Latin

Having grown up on a diet of cartridges and cheat codes, making a pixel font felt kind of inevitable. The distinct lack of descenders on lowercase forms, the way the letters work but don't really work... They all fill me with a warm nostalgia. A feeling that we wanted to capture in our own characterful way.

So we made Spryte. It's an 8x8 pixel font with a handful of matching icons thrown in. It’s bold, blocky, and built for screens that never knew retina.

We were late 80's kids meaning we were living in a post-arcade world but early to the mobile phone boom. We wanted to create something that captures the weird space between button mashing a game of Excite Bike, and texting your friends on your Nokia 3210 (the original one, by the way). Something a bit more modern than retro, but still unmistakably 8-bit.

The Uppercase develops a sort of weighty vertical stress. It adds boldness without overloading the horizontal strokes, which was a tricky balance considering the limited detail. Anyway, it's slightly more font than pile of bricks, and begging to be used in some short, punchy text lines. I've never enjoyed typesetting 'Insert Coin' more than with Spryte.