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2 days ago
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Hypertexts: new forms of writing, appearing on computer screens, that will branch or perform at the reader’s command. A hypertext is a non-sequential piece of writing; only the computer display makes it practical.
Hypersystem is a new font I designed for the web version of Hypermedia Systems.
Recently, I reworked the web page of our book Hypermedia Systems (https://hypermedia.systems). I was happy with the layout, but unhappy with how the book title looked. It was set in Jaro, a great free display font we also used for the print release, but I didn’t think it worked to communicate the tone of our book on the home page.
After trying out a few alternatives, Carson suggested that I adapt the lettering from the cover of the paperback edition. The pixel artist we hired did an absolutely fantastic job, but we decided to roll our own for the lettering.
After trying to make off-the-shelf fonts work for a while, we eventually asked the artist for the original PSDs and I lettered in a custom title. Making it go behind the car was Carson’s idea.
The published cover.
The initial plan was to make an unslanted version of the lettering and put it on the landing page as an image, but I’d recently heard about Panic’s Caps font design tool for the Playdate console, so I decided to give a making a whole font a go.
Caps is great, but it can only save fonts in a Playdate-specific format — a fact I realized far too late. After much searching, I found Bits’n’Picas, a bitmap font tool that could both import the Playdate format and export to .ttf.
The font is live on https://hypermedia.systems, both on the landing page and in the content for chapter and section headings.
Right now, Hypersystem supports ASCII, rudimentary Turkish, and a few extra punctuation characters.
