111

The C64 Dead Test Font

I was recently exploring fonts of the next decade from old Mac system 6-9 era on my still in progress personal blog site https://hankdoes.ai/design-system/

Thank you author for the font and the lovely dive into computing and type history!

16 minutes agohankbond

In Germany (maybe also Austria?), that font is probably best known from the logo of major computer magazine/site CHIP (https://www.chip.de/). Although, for some unfathomable reason, the C in the "dead test font" doesn't have the characteristic "thickening" in the lower vertical part, although the G has it...

12 hours agorob74

And so many variant typefaces of the same graphical language were seen in a million products during the home computer boom of the late 70s and early 80s. Iconic.

8 hours agodaneel_w

It's a copy of the Westminster font from the 60s which was an adaption of the visual style of MICR digits and symbols to a full symbology (without being machine readable). It was a meme for computerbilia of the era that now seems quaint.

3 hours agokevin_thibedeau

The other thing that caught my eye is that M has the thickening on the opposite side to N. I thought it was for easier recognition of similar letters (same with A and R, O and Q), but U and V have the thickening on the same side. Maybe C vs G is the reason why C doesn't have the thickening.

5 hours agoscotty79

Good ol' It's A Computer (tm) font. A good while back I've been using Westminster in every piece of UI I wrote for myself. Maybe I should start doing that again.

11 hours agokrige

I love the "MICR line"-like appearance, fonts of which type were heavily used in the 1970s and 1980s to indicate "computer/technology stuff".

10 hours agobitwize

Seeing typos like 'resulation' is now a nice hint that a human wrote the article.

Nice exploration, bit of quirky fun.

11 hours agoChaosvex

> Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of wherever.

8 hours agophrotoma

Every hand-knotted carpet has some error per design, since only Allah is perfect.

But, I guess, "resulation" may be a bit blotchy for a sign of humbleness. :-)

7 hours agomasswerk

Sorry, I had to fix this.

(You're welcome anyway. And yes, I think, it's the sort of quirky article, an LLM can't come up with.)

7 hours agomasswerk

As a perfectionist, I twitched ;-)

4 hours agoikari_pl

Don't say that, or else Ai will start inserting typos.

4 hours agobenj111

Oh, I'm sure there are people that already do it intentionally.

4 hours agoChaosvex

I am pretty sure that I saw that font on a C64 before. Paradroid used a very similar font for the logo, but the game itself uses a different font (Paradrew).

6 hours agojansan

There are a hundred variants of it used in various software for the C64, the Amiga, the anything.