Pixel Art is the Foe of Typography

I'm going to keep this short and sour: Pixel artists, overall, are terrible at designing fonts for their videogames & artworks! Rather than bitch about an entire giant community, setting up straw men, and remaining unfocused, I think constructively consider a few real-life examples made within the last seven days would better demonstrate my point.

Exhibit A: Sabaku June 3rd, 2018

Take a look at something wonderful I found earlier today. This artist is clearly talented in almost every small way imaginable: the color scheme is well thought out, the anatomy of not only the people but snake are great (for example, person on the right has a shoulder distinct from his/ her arm), the user interface is professional, and she has a good knowledge of lighting with 3D objects. I could criticize the perspective and shadows, but more importantly, this is a well-executed image that I wouldn't be ashamed to frame on my wall.

...And yet, the text illustrated at the top is hardly legible! The Us look like Os—the As look like Hs—the LU looks like a W—Ps look like lowercase Es—everything is too close to each other creating two fancy rectangles, rather than blocks of information. Relative to the gorgeous art and wise design, the font in use fails at it's most important job.

Sadly, this is one of the slightly better uses of font I've seen lately, and I bet a lot of effort went into it no less. There is intention and logic behind why the font is the way it is: 90-degree angles, smooth corners, consistency throughout the letters. What I'm trying to say is that I don't blame the artist as much as I blame the medium she is working within. When it comes to pixel art and font, it is a no-win situation, because vector curves are the foundation and origin of this deep tradition. Perhaps I shouldn't even blame the medium—perhaps the people who look at an image like this and focus too much on trying to read it as soon as they look at it are the ones causing a problem. Is it perhaps that this use of the font is "right" for the image in question, and therefore the image is "progressive" for shaping text around pixel art traditions? Likewise, am I asking too much for fonts in pixel art to conform to traditional standards of prioritizing curves and distinction among the letters?

Exhibit B: Commission of a portrait of a cute youngster by @Sinistarino on Twitter

What about tiny fonts that have little to work with? Surely, any flaw I could point out would be difficult to fix without creating a new flaw, even for the best of typographers. Again, it's a no-win situation, so why play a game you can't even win? What if I am right that this is an inferior aesthetic for the font in the images in question—that the problem is with the artist's choice? Maybe the problem really is sticking too closely to tradition, not my tradition of curves and distinct letters, but of making everything uniform.

Here is my argument at last: Pixel artists act like Modernists who didn't learn the lessons taught by Postmodernism. The iron will of conformity is that all space within the boundaries of the image must be pixels in perfect grid form, no matter what. It's the "no matter what" part that is causing a problem. If we as artists close ourselves to alternative thinking, we lose the opportunity to improve. The only reasons I can think to keep the font pixelated with the rest of the image is to uphold a tradition taken to its logical extreme and to appease the people who want art from the artists. I bet you anything that Sinistarino has a lovely, deeply personal signature that would make this piece of art twice as great, but we'll never get to see that. Instead, the signature (ART BY SINISTARINO) looks awfully machine made and devoid of charm, and it, therefore, sticks out, comically. I want to see the fine curves of her hand stokes, the very thing that pixel squares can't convey in detail.

Father God in Heaven (or Mother Nature, pick one), when he created the universe, and all the cosmos within it, signed nothing with his name, so why, you might ask, should a humble man or woman put love and soul into their signatures rather than something that draws little attention? Because the creation of beauty is an act of love and compassion for the beholders, and if you are to be gift-givers to the world, do the best you can to make every inch—every centimeter—of your creation the most beautiful it can be, for that pleases the people of this Earth.

So, in closing, I ask two things to all pixel artists: take typography extremely seriously, and break conventions for the sake of beauty (example: just cause everyone else is using only one color in their font color-palette doesn't mean you should too).


Post Script:
By pure coincidence (as-in I did not pick these with this purpose) both images are made by women depicting women as subject matter. This is a minor demonstration of why I like democratic libertarianism: the market props up whoever is best at art. Women got a big slice of the top feature of the pixelart hashtag today simply because people got together and decided they liked their art the most. If women truly are equals to men, then logically, an unbiased market would give them equal chance at proving their value. Yet again today, when left to their own methods, the people were able to bring about something wonderful: subtle feminism.