@kirksucks
1. Koobz - this one unfortunately does not get as many downloads but I think its well done and interesting
2. Brutal Tooth - great because it appeals to emoticore/deathcore bands. There aren't many fonts on dafont like this so it was great that you made this font!
3. Ghetto Marquee - I love grungy fonts! They take like no skill to make and most of them on dafont are rip offs of other fonts but whatever haha! I make a bunch myself so yeah

@daaams
1. Posca Mad Thrashers - You have pretty writing! I know this font probably wasn't supposed to look 'pretty' but yeah. I think its pretty haha
2. Abuse - kinda like Posca Mad Thrashers, however the fixed width of the lines give it a less spontaneous feel
3. Knife Fight - I like this font a lot! The name fits really well I think :]

@vinz
Well you only have 3 fonts so I can't really choose a top 3. I'll just pick my favorite which is Defused hands down!
A lot of fonts on dafont have really 'cheap' looking grunge. I'm guilty of making crap fonts too I must admit (but I get lazy and they still get downloads so I continue to do so). See my own Northwood High and University High for examples of what I mean when I say 'cheap' grunge.

Well anyhow, I think Defused is one of the few grunge fonts which has a really great grunge effect. I don't really know how to describe it, its just so amazing haha. Really intense looking.

i totally understand what you mean about "cheap grunge". It's all albout using a normal commercial font, applying the same cheap effect (or cheap brush) in photoshop on all the characters, then exporting all the characters in a new font.
There is a canadian guy i don't remember the name, who's an expert at uploading such fonts on dafont. Always using a famous font as a base, then breaking this font and its kerning by applying a real cheap filter. His "creative proccess" was so quick that he released fonts every week.
All his fonts have a real success, but i really couldn't explain why.

i don't want to talk in the name of vinz, but every character in Defused seems to be individually destroyed by hand, that's why it has a real grunge feeling. Just like the Base02 font by Stereotype.

Thanks for the comments! That's right, every single glyph of defused were grunged in high resolution then vectorized. I really really need to make the lowercase and redraw every characters for an alternate font, but i need time...

@metaphasebrothel: You seem to be giving very sophisticated critics. I like that. Unfortunately i have only two fonts yet. I saw your artwork and may be you could like this homepage http://www.rouvenstucki.ch/read/59 (it's a friend of mine). Your fonts are great, i wonder how it would look like, when you typeset a page of the national geographic in those glyphs. You know there was a guy who once typeset an interview in Wingdings, it looked fun – FixCystNeon looks very innovative to me, what were your inspirations?

«A picture is worth more than a thousand words»

@sonoguerilla: Your friend's homepage is awesome. He/she should make some dingbat fonts.

Re: FixCystNeon: This is the DOS Command Prompt font, and the Notepad font in Windows prior to Windows 2000. It was always a system-only font which could not be used in other applications, and it couldn't be printed, (ie: a page typed in Notepad with Windows '95, '98 or ME would appear as a different font if printed). If you are using a Windows computer, Go to Start > Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt to see it in use as a system font. If you are using a MAC, I don't know if you have access to DOS.

I used this source graphic:



Each glyph in the above graphic is contained within a 12x8 pixel matrix, which includes the ascenders, descenders, and the spacing.

I increased each graphic by twenty-five times, then hollowed out the center, so there is an eight pixel black border, with at least nine pixels of white in the interior. It was designed really big so that the black outline would be thin and uniform at small point s sizes, and there would still be some white in the center, at least down to eight points, (which is about 20-24 points size for a standard font). I used MS Paint to make the glyphs, and ScanFont 3.13 to make the
font.

Sample of a FixCystNeon source graphic, prior to conversion to monochrome:



There is a smaller, solid weight of this font available on dafont, Green Screen by James Shields:

http://www.dafont.com/search.php?psize=m&q=green+screen

so I won't be making a small solid weight version, but I hope to do a smaller white text on black background version of the full 255 character set, if I can solve the problem of white slivers between glyphs. The graphic on the download page won't look correct on a monitor that does not have a 4:3 aspect ratio. On wide screen LCD monitors, slivers of white will appear within the panagram. There are a lot of specific instructions on how to use the font within the read me.

For the Obey series, I took colour 'Obey' graphics that I found on the Internet, cropped them, if necessary, and adjusted the sizes to a uniform 280 pixel height, with variable widths. I then converted the colour graphics to monochrome, pixel by pixel, and also edited many of them extensively within ScanFont. The source graphics for the series, in monochrome bitmap, are available on my homepage, or through this direct link:

http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~luc/Obey-Graphics.zip

Thanks for the comments.

~bito

Hey if anyone could give me feedback on my fonts that'd be great!
And I totally agree btw. With meta

Review of Pi Luo's fonts (from newest):

Lemons Can Fly: Unremarkable, and somewhat of a disappointment, when compared to your earlier work.

Rocketship Town: Not bad, but I get the impression that you modified an existing font to make this. If would be better if it had some punctuation.

White Tie Affair: This is eye-catching, but the spacing/kerning seems to be off on the (lower case?), I. Again, some basic punctuation would improve this significantly, but it doesn't necessarily need accented characters.

Valerie Hand: Not terribly different from a thousand other 'naive' hand printed fonts, but you get a bonus point for the extended character set. This one would probably look a lot better in a document or in a graphic than it does on the dafont character set page, but it doesn't scream out "install me!"

University High: This is one of the better eroded fonts, and I like it a lot. The right spacing on the lower case i looks to be off. Once again, some punctuation would have been nice.

Make Juice: This one is eye catching. It would make for a good logo font for a Metal band.

Gothical: A winner. One of your best.

Infected: This one had a run at #1 on the top fonts page, and not without merit. I made one of the 12 comments already on the font's page.

Celeste Hand: Not terribly different from a ton of amateurish stuff on deviantArt.

Gordon Heights: This isn't bad, but it looks like a hand drawn version of an existing font with minor variations. I'm not good at font identification, but it does look familiar.

James Han: This one is one of your best. I could see it having a lot of practical uses. The extended character set is most appeciated, Two thumbs up.

Northwood High: the W,X,Y, and Z in lower case and caps don't seem to have received the full treatment, but I could see more than a few people wanting to purchase a license for this one. It could work great in movie or TV credits.

Clarisse: Me likeum.

Black Casper: One of the more interesting ransom note fonts I've seen. Props.

Alien Strawberry: For some reason I like this one, but I don't know why.

Asian Girl: I guess this was your first font, and it shows.

Overall impression: I know that you are much younger than almost all of the dafont designers, but to your credit, I have judged your work as a peer, rather than as an apprentice. If you are modifying existing fonts to make your own, you should stop doing that, as you no longer need to do so. Your original designs are your best ones, not including the hand printed stuff, which you shouldn't be doing anymore at this point. You can make better use of your time.

~bito

review of sonoguerilla:

Fat Otto: Provided that you did not modify an existing font, (which I don't think you did), this is well rendered and economical in vector nodes. It's not terribly different from a lot of other modern sans serifs, but the technical aspects are very impressive. It would have been nice if you had allowed embedding. For fonts that are free for personal use, you should include a read me.

Helvedding: The renderring is not as clean as for Fat Otto, but this is arguably a better font. As you have told me it is inspired by Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch, I compared the two, and yours is sufficiently different to not in any way be considered a clone. Once again, allowing embedding and including a read me would be appreciated. You have done a good job of updating an ancient style. You might gain some additional inspiration from the work of Dieter Steffmann. I believe all of his fonts are free.

~bito

@metaphasebrothel
thanks so much!
I really appreciate the feedback. I agree with you on like everything. Not really important but the reason I still do grunge/handwritten fonts are because grunge fonts get downloads and hand written fonts are usually well liked. Celeste Hand doesn't get a lot of downloads, but people must like it because it has 2nd most comments out of my fonts and I actually see it on the web a lot as youtube video watermarks, on tumblr (tumblr ppl use Celeste Hand a LOT) and yeah. I've only come across Infected font once online. So yeah, I mean, how many people liked Comic Sans, Kristen ITC, Bradley Hand, or Tempus Sans when they were kids?

*raises hand guiltily*
But yeah, thanks! :]

Pi Luo > contrary to metaphasebrothel, i find your handwritten fonts more interesting than the majority of the handwritten fonts you can download on dafont. Characters perfectly fit together, They're clean, and you know how to write... it's not always the case if you look at the Handwritten category ! I like your handwritten fonts =)

But in my case i don't like fonts like University High, White the Affair,... If i need such an effect in one of my projects, i prefer to use the original font (yeah, apparently they're derivatives) and create my own effect.

More generally, and it's not especially about you, but I think the grunge / destroy categories of dafont should be cleaned, there are too many clones of these kind of fonts. Open a successful famous stolen pay-font in photoshop, apply a destroy effect to it, import it into fontlab, export in TTF then upload it to dafont.
Some of the destroy fonts i like : Base02, Defused, Frakturika,... even if they're derivatives, you can see there's a lot of work on these fonts, it's not just about applying an effect.

Good job, daaams. Finally, we have a second opinion on someone's fonts.

@ daaams: Thanks for giving me the idea of how to do a grunge font i've been working my ass off always trying to redraw and scan if i have to do a REAL grungy headlines (downloading isn't funny to do ). But don't worry i'm not interested in uploading anything i've not entirely created on my own (of course with certain inspirations "<3 Dax" :/).

@ metaphasebrothel: I was commenting some of your work and i sometimes was a bit lost for words because it's very experimental and therefore very interesting and catchy. I only did phat otto because my friends told me that helvedding isn't readable (it's not readable but i like that). On phat otto i discovered the "metrics", i didn't know anything about metrics when i was doing the helvedding. Still the phat otto is better for big sizes because small sizes aren't spaced enough. Thanks for the comments i'll do a "read me" next time.

besides how can i allow embedding? (sorry noobish question)

@ sonoguerilla: First, embedding of a font means that the font can be viewed in a document, (for example, an MS Word or .pdf doc), when the font has not been installed. If you downloaded my FixCystNeon, there is an MS Word 2000 character guide in which the font has been embedded. Embedding can be done in MS Word 2000 and 2003 but I don't think it can be done in Word 2007, unless you are using Word 2007 to modify a document originally made with Word 2000/2003. I know this is the case for Text Effects like shimmer, Broadway lights. marching red ants, etc.

I'm not sure how to do it in a .pdf, but in Word 2000/2003, chose Tools from the Menu Bar > Options... > Save tab in the Options dialog box > check the two boxes for 'Embed true type fonts' and 'Embed characters in use only' > OK > Save the document. I'm not sure if it works for Open type as well as True Type fonts.

Note: DO NOT uninstall a font that has been used in an embedded document, unless you delete the embedded document first! I did that once, and it corrupted every copy of that font that I had on my computer, including copies in unopened archives! I have no idea why that happened, or if it was an isolated occurrence, but don't take the chance.

Note: You can only embed one font in any given MS Word doc. I'm not sure if this limitation applies in .pdf.

Note: You can only embed a font that allows embedding, and this setting is determined by the font designer. If you want to, you can change the designer's embedding setting and regenerate a copy of the font, but that would be frowned upon by purists. To be certain that the embedding has worked properly, you would need to view, or have someone else view, the document on a computer on which the embedded font has not been installed. If you use a font that is installed on your computer in an MS Word 2000 or 2003 document, but you do not embed the font, someone else looking at an electronic copy of the document will see the text displayed in Times New Roman.

In FontCreator, the embedding settings are found in Format from the Menu Bar > Settings... > General tab in the Font Settings dialog box > Font embedding - Licensing right section, (second from the top on the right) > Edit button > check the box for 'Editable embedding' > OK.

In FontLab Studio5, go to File in Menu Bar > Font Info, (or use the Font Info icon) > open 'Names and Copyright > select Embedding > chose 'Everything is allowed, (installable mode)' from the list box of options > OK.

If you are modifying an existing font to change embedding settings, you would have to generate a new font after making the changes. We at Metaphase Brothel Graphix do not advocate the changing of other designers' embedding settings, but if you chose to do so, that's how you would do it.

For ScanFont 3.13, there are no embedding settings; the 'everything is allowed' option is the default, and another font editing program would have to be used to change this setting to something else.

Hope this helps,

~bobistheowl

I would really appreciate some critique for my fonts (http://www.domenicosdesign.com/fonts)!

d{esign], I find that the lower case f in PicO really seems to be out of place with the rest of the font. I understand that you probably created the descender so that it could be distinguished from the capital F, but to me, that letter just looks wrong, like the Sesame Street song 'One of these things is not like the other...'. The rest of it is well done. It's clean, but unexciting.

Zepto is more original, but I think it would be better if all glyphs had an equal width. I don't know if this is an optical illusion, but the capital L, for example, seems to be noticeably wider than the capital M and W. I'm not fond of the lower case s and z, the number 2, and the upper and lower case c with cedilla, (Ç, ç). Then again, I'm basing this on the display on the dafont page. These letters might look fine in the context of a document or graphic. Perhaps you could post some graphics of your fonts in use, so we can get a better impression of them.

I'll pass on reviewing your commercial fonts, and that will apply to anyone else who makes commercial fonts as well as free/shareware/free for personal use fonts.

As always, these are just my opinions, nothing more, so other people may find them more appealing than I do.

~bito

I agree that the lowercase "f" in Pico/Pic0 looks out of place. At the time of creation it seemed like the best option as it didn't compete with the uppercase "F". An option would be to utilise the lowercase "f" used in Pico's ligatures as the lowercase "f". Although it's higher than the caps-height it has a more natural look.


Lol at the Sesame Street reference.

Zepto's main glyphs (letters and numbers) are all 3 units wide (excluding "i", "j" and "l" ). I guess you could say it's an optical illusion. The lowercase "c" with cedilla is terrible considering the cedilla is about as big as the "c", but because of the self imposed constraint of making a tiny pixel font I really had no choice, same for the lowercase "s" and "z". A sub-pixel job would be the true solution but whether anyone would be willing to use six overlapping fonts over each other (grey, blue and brown and tones of those colours) I'm not sure. It's something that would have to wait until fonts are able to be programmed with colours. That would be so cool...

This is a sample of Zepto in use from my site:


Unfortunately some of the glyphs on the daFont glyph map previews for my fonts are skewed and the spacing for the Zepto preview isn't right, hence the link to my site in the previous post which also links to MyFonts which provides a nice preview.

Thank you for the critique Bito; it's great to have my concerns reaffirmed. I'm intrigued as to why you don't want to look at commercial fonts though?

Btw: As you can see from my failed attempt at using HTML, how do you display pictures in a post? (Thanks Bito)

@ d[esign]: To put graphics in your post, do the following:

1) Type [ img ], but don't have any spaces between the brackets and the letters. I have to type it this way for the text to display properly in the forum post. The img can be in upper or lower case, and these are the square brackets between the P and the backslash on your keyboard.

2) Type, or copy/paste, the url of your image. There should be no space between the right bracket and the H in http.

3 Following the url of the image, type [ /img ], again, with no spaces between the end of the image address and the left bracket, and with no spaces between the left bracket and the forward slash, and no spaces between the l in url and the right bracket.

If you want to include a hyperlink to an Internet page, follow the same procedure above, but substitute url for img.

I looked at your commercial fonts, but I won't be doing reviews of anyone's commercial fonts, because they would and should be judged on a completely different basis. For a free or shareware font, my decision is "is it worth the bandwidth and the diskspace?" For a commercial font, the decision is "is it worth the money?" All of my reviews so far have taken into account amateur or semi-pro status, and the expectations of that level of expertise. When fonts are offered for sale, their quality should be judged against the standards of other commercial fonts. I hope some people will give you reviews of your commercial work. Unfortunately, I won't be one of them.

I am in no way an expert in fonts. I don't even read the font identification forum, and there probably aren't more than 100 fonts that I can identify just by a text sample, (but I could probably identify the designer on many more, just not the font names). I just decided to start doing reviews because kirksucks wanted some feedback, per the first post in the thread, and nobody else was doing it, so I took the initiative. My reviews are simply that, what I think of the work by the people who have asked for feedback. If you read all of them, you'll know that I'm not fond of hand printed fonts, mostly because there are already too many of these. I also have expectations that more recent work will be equal to, or better in quality than previous work, which is why I review them in sequence, from most recent. Like most of us, I google my own work every so often. The only online reviews of my Obey series are "Dude has waaay too much time on his hands-" and something on a Croatian blog.

Here's something interesting that a guy named Dennis Jansen did with my AmyBats fonts:

http://sharebee.com/158a5243

That series was surprisingly popular, although they are technically among my worst fonts. I think I spent about a day on each of those fonts. By contrast, I often spent multiple days on single glyphs in the Obey series.

Very briefly: Would I purchase any of your fonts? No. Would I buy any of my own, if someone else had made them? No. Do I own a lot of commercial fonts? Yes. Did I buy any of them? No. Am I doing anything with them? No. I don't even own a printer, and I use Bookman Old Style for just about all of my MS Word documents.

I make fonts because I like to make fonts, and I make them for other people who collect fonts, because other people have made fonts that I collect. I would like to think that my fonts, (most of them, anyway), would be 'must haves' for dingbat font collectors, and anything beyond that is a bonus. I've probably got five or six GB of fonts that have never been extracted from their .zip archives, including yours. I'm at the point where I don't know what I have anymore, and it takes Windows search twenty minutes to go through the folder with my unsorted archives, so I probably have multiple copies of thousands of fonts. If I win the lottery, I'll hire a summer student to sort and label everything after September, 2008. I was pretty well organized, until then. Once I started to make my own, I had much less time to sort and label other people's stuff. I still download the new stuff here and at fontspace, but I actual install only a small fraction of those.

Fair enough. I thought it might have been because I'm not paying you, lol. I on the other hand judge type (anywhere) on aesthetics and fonts on aesthetics and usability, for me that's where the value is. There's commercial type, free type and type I see as graffiti in public spaces that I like and hate, ha ha, I'm constantly reviewing. Honestly the difference between commercial and free type in so many cases is just price.


I wouldn't say being able to identify so many fonts makes anyone an expert, maybe just really good at memorising things. In my opinion a "Font (really should be "Type" ) Expert" should be able to distinguish type styles, know the terminology, critique and make good type.


There's the review! I'll make a "proper" font one day.


My first font "BoxyBlocks" made it up to 30th on the MyFonts Best Seller List, it was my first and best font and I think I spent more time making "Corrente" and "Geometrix". As important as technical quality and execution is it's ultimately the idea that's fundamental.


Are you intending on starting up a daFont clone?

I won't be starting any kind of website anytime soon. I need all of my bandwidth for video file sharing. I'll stick to reviewing free/shareware/free for personal use fonts, and maybe some of the other people reading this thread will pick up the gauntlet and review commercial fonts. I'm already doing more than my share in this thread.

If I do ever make a website, it will be metaphasebrothel dot com. metaphase isn't a real word, but it sounds like one. The metaphase brothel would be a place where transdimensional beings hang out while travelling through hyperspace. Metaphase Brothel is an anagram of my name, as is "breatheshempalot", which was used as the creator for my Bewarethefriendlystranger font. I guess I was predestined to make fonts, because another anagram of my name is alphabet theorems.

Find the anagrams of your own name here:

http://www.mbhs.edu/~bconnell/cgi-bin/anagram.cgi

~bito

I was kidding, plus I think it would be even more illegal to redistribute the commercial fonts you didn't buy!