[HN Gopher] Quake 1 potential original font
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       Quake 1 potential original font
        
       Author : ta123456789
       Score  : 65 points
       Date   : 2024-06-16 19:30 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (cohost.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (cohost.org)
        
       | muglug wrote:
       | Way too many differences for it to be a feasible origin typeface.
       | This post is based on a few similar-looking letters but they're
       | not even that similar-looking: the O, for example, has a
       | different curvature.
        
         | nightowl_games wrote:
         | This isn't viral mutation we're talking about here. An artist
         | easily could have redrawn the O because of some issue or purely
         | taste. There's a lot of commonalities and the article seems
         | interesting and potentially correct.
        
         | Sharlin wrote:
         | I wouldn't put too much weight on curvature differences, that's
         | an inevitable part of turning curved letterforms into a bitmap
         | font. The letters would obviously have required significant
         | pixel-by-pixel tweaking to look good on a 320x240 raster.
        
         | beardyw wrote:
         | Yes, the A in Quake is very different having a small bridge in
         | the cross piece, whereas the font shown omits the lefthand
         | stroke almost entirely to create a bridge.
        
       | greenthrow wrote:
       | Doubtless there is a font that inspired Avia and one that
       | inspired that and on and on. This is the true nature of
       | creativity. Not the mythical creation born of nothing.
        
         | gavmor wrote:
         | > We have all seen proofs where faulty platemaking or light
         | inking has lost all hairlines in a delicate roman. Raphael
         | Boguslav observed the effect and understood it as a
         | sophisticated form of stencil design.
         | 
         | Two clicks in.
        
         | parasti wrote:
         | Agreed. I was thinking how, even if you somehow create
         | something in isolation, all it can do is stand on its own. A
         | thing created on top of decades and centuries of other
         | creations stands taller, it has history and context.
        
       | mmastrac wrote:
       | This isn't really convincing. The P, G, R and Y are significantly
       | different and appear in both the Quake sample and the font
       | sample. S is significantly flatter. The cherry-picked examples
       | are the most basic letters and likely to have parallel evolution
       | because of the constraints of that design space.
       | 
       | I think it's more likely to be a hand-crafted font, inspired by
       | the general layout of stencil letters but no more than that.
        
       | fwlr wrote:
       | I think the A and the N nix this theory. It's almost more like
       | the Quake font designer _saw_ this font, _remembered_ the concept
       | of hairlines reduced to nothing, but when they applied the
       | concept they made different choices on which hairlines to apply
       | it to.
        
       | risenshinetech wrote:
       | This would be much more convincing by writing out the entire
       | words instead of overlaying a very small sample of the font next
       | to a screenshot of the Quake menu. As it stands it's very hard to
       | draw a conclusion.
        
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       (page generated 2024-06-16 23:00 UTC)