Found a hand-coded pixel font on an old Atari demo disc at a garage sale in Boise | Crafting With Code

Taylor Moore · 2026-10-02T06:50:03.673233+00:00

Stopped at a garage sale off State Street in Boise two weeks ago and dug through a box of old floppies and demo discs for 20 bucks. One disc had a little scrolling text intro where every letter was drawn pixel by pixel, and I sat there zooming in on my phone for maybe 30 minutes just counting the blocks. Whoever made that font used 5 pixels wide on almost every letter and 7 tall, and the lowercase letters had this tiny notch that made them look hand-cut. It hit me that most of my own icon work now is just dragging bezier handles in Figma until stuff snaps to a grid, and I never really look at each pixel. I pulled the glyphs into a sprite sheet and rebuilt the whole set as an actual web font last weekend, mostly to see if I still could. Feels like something got lost when we stopped drawing letters one square at a time. Anybody else still make pixel fonts by hand, or did you all move to vector the day the tools got good?

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Found a hand-coded pixel font on an old Atari demo disc at a garage sale in Boise | Crafting With Code - The Design Community Hub