FontDiscovery 🖼️ 52: Press Start on a New Year with This Gaming Font
I'm Hua, a designer and bootstrapping founder building Typogram, a brand design tool. As part of running Typogram, I create this digestible weekly guide with fonts, colors, and design ideas to help founders, creators, and makers step up their game in marketing and get creative!
Hi Everyone 👋
Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful holiday relaxing with family and celebrating with friends. My holiday was a bit funny this year – I originally had plans to visit my parents but canceled three hours before my trip. The case number for omicron was rising, and my anxiety about travel during the pandemic got to me. I was worried about bringing the virus home and making them sick. In the end, we had the holidays remotely. It wasn’t ideal, but I felt better knowing they were safe.
I am working on my 2022 goals this week, which I hope to share with you soon. In the past, I overcommitted myself with goals. This year I am trying to be light and narrow down my priorities. A top goal of mine is definitely to experiment more with FontDiscovery!
What are your top goals for this year? Feel free to share with me via email. And if you have suggestions or ideas for the newsletter, I’m always all ears.
In This Issue…
- Fonts: Press Start 2P
- Design idea: Good Time Planning
- Color Inspiration: Night Time in Amazon Forest
img: sample of Press Start 2P – Do you have a friend who could profit from the weekly design tips, just like you do? Please consider forwarding or sharing FontDiscovery with your friend by clicking on the button down below.
Font of the Week
About Press Start 2P
Press Start 2P is perfect for projects that have game themes. This font mimics bitmap fonts found in early Namco arcade games; Specifically, Return of the Ishtar, created in 1986. Return of the Ishtar was one of the first games to include lowercase and uppercase letters in its game screen font. Previously, most gaming user interface fonts had uppercase letters only.
These earlier gaming fonts have an iconic, identifiable look because they are bitmapped. The limited screen resolution back then restricted how fonts were designed and rendered. This resulted in an iconic look and vibe that is still much used in the design and branding of games today (We also covered a crazy fun spin of bitmap fonts and blackletter in issue no.30 ).
A revival and significant improvement of the original, Press Start 2P includes a variety of characters and multilingual support for Greek and Cyrillic.
Img: original UI in Return of the Ishtar; source: Wikipedia
Font Detail
- Bitmap look
- One weight
img: font detail of Press Start 2P
Specific Usage Tips
How to use Press Start 2P for logo?
When most people glance at this font, they will think of gaming and cultures around gaming, like streaming, tech, fandom, digital/pop culture. Press Start 2P is perfect for projects with these themes. It is relatively legible as a logo and communicates a playful gaming vibe.
How to use Press Start 2P for marketing and branding?
Press Start 2P is perfect for visuals communicating fun, tech culture, and gaming. Though Press Start 2P is readable, it is not most pleasing to read because it looks bitmapped. It works better as a display font and pairs well with sans serif like Montserrat.
Design Idea of the Week
Good Time Planning
I am always looking for tools that will help me be more mindful. During my break, I discovered something called Good Time Journal.
Good Time Journal is an activity log that tracks your activity to help you be more mindful of the task you are doing and discover things you take, enabling you to find the things you enjoy. It is one of the tools created by Burnett and Dave Evans, two design professors at Stanford, in their book, Designing Your Life (which I heard is fantastic! ). You can check out the free tool here. Let me know what you think.
Color Inspirations of the Week
Night Time in Amazon Forest
This week, enjoy this beautiful color palette from nature during the nighttime in the Amazon rainforest.
Indigo #0457B9 | Salsa #E9570A | Burnt Amber #F09C23 | Light Grass #ADBA81
img: Amazon forest; source: unsplash
Jargon Buster
Bowl
Bowl is a closed curved stroke that connects to either a vertical stroke or itself.
Img: Bowl of letter
Creative Prompt
Create something with Press Start 2P!
Thank you
…for reading and hanging out here this week! Press Start 2P is available here.
img: infographic of Press Start 2P
If you enjoy this series, you can subscribe here:
Have more questions about design and fonts?
Please email me hua@typogram.co or find me on Twitter at @HuaTweets.
You can also read the past issues on Typogram's blog.
