#pixel type

Typography Tuesday

This week we present some sample pages from Toshi Omagari’s 2019 Thames & Hudson publication Arcade Game Typography: The Art of Pixel Type. A really exquisite and comprehensive study, we couldn’t describe this dense tome better than the publisher:

Video game designers of the 70s, 80s and 90s faced colour and resolution limitations that stimulated incredible creativity: with letters having to exist in an 8x8 square grid, artists found ways to create expressive and elegant character sets within a tiny canvas. 

Featuring pixel typefaces carefully selected from the first decades of arcade video games, Arcade Game Typography presents a previously undocumented "outsider typography" movement, accompanied by insightful commentary from author Toshi Omagari, a Monotype typeface designer himself, and screenshots of the type in use. 

Exhaustively researched, this book gathers an eclectic typography from hit games such as Super Sprint, Pac-Man, After Burner, Marble Madness, Shinobi, as well as countless lesser-known gems. The book presents its typefaces on a dynamic and decorative grid, taking reference from high-end type specimens while adding a suitably playful twist. Unlike print typefaces, pixel type often has bold colour `baked in' to the characters, so Arcade Game Typography looks unlike any other typography book, fizzing with life and colour.

Fizzing, indeed! A very bold and exhaustive study. Toshi Omagari is a typeface designer at Monotype UK. He studied typography and design at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, graduating in 2008, and received an MA in typeface design from the University of Reading in 2011. Arcade Game Typography is his first book.

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