Designing the Perfect Pixel Font with Helena Zhang! 👾

Let's dive into the world of font design and creation with Helena Zhang, creator of the awesomely pixelated Departure Mono font.

⁠Hi everybody - I have a collection of fonts spanning decades that I carry around and use for my projects. As it turns out, I’m not alone. Many of you have shared similar tidbits where a Dropbox folder, USB key, or even a rare floppy disk is kept around for the sole purpose of preserving fonts from yesteryear for future projects.

This got me thinking. What is it about a great font where it becomes a key pillar of our designs? What goes into creating a font? What does a font designer do? What is the end-to-end process like to go from having an idea to having a font file people can install on their devices?

To answer questions like this (and more), I was thrilled to sit down and chat with the talented multi-disciplinary designer Helena Zhang. In the following video, Helena and I dive deep into fonts, retro designs, and a whole lot more:

You can also watch/listen to this podcast on YouTube (formerly Google Podcasts), Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

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Creating Departure Mono

Helena designed and created Departure Mono, a fantastic retro-inspired pixel font that quickly became my default for displaying and editing code:

During our chat, Helena walked through the many sources of inspiration that went into creating the font. That so much about the font and its presentation has a nice techy / geeky / sci-fi / retro vibe should not at all be surprising. We covered old computer screens, physical printouts, classic video games, other pixel fonts, pixel-inspired websites, design elements from various movies & tv shows, and a whole lot more.

For a listing of the various sources we talked about, check out the links in this Tweet.

Warning. Some of those links will definitely take you back in time to an era of bold colors, pixelated fonts & icons, and unrestrained creativity! 😅

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Until Next Time

That I love pixel art and all things related to it is…an understatement. Beyond having Departure Mono be my default font in my code editor (IDX), I have switched over to using Departure Mono as the font used for all of the site’s code snippets as well:

A huge thanks to Helena for creating an awesomely legible monospaced pixel font that is great for designs as well as everyday use.

And with that, I hope you found my chat with Helena inspirational and informative. If you have any questions or comments, the easiest way to reach me is by posting in this forum thread or replying to this email.

Cheers,
Kirupa 😇