Silkscreen: a four font type family for your Web graphics.
Download Silkscreen for Windows
Download Silkscreen for Macintosh
Frequently asked questions about Silkscreen
Can I contact you about Silkscreen?
 
Sure! Send your feedback (good or bad) to jason@0sil8.com. Please read the rest of the FAQ before emailing though. You should especially let me know of any problems you encounter when using Silkscreen. Note that I did not say "installation problems"...consult your system's help files for assistance in installing fonts.
 

 

What did you use to make Silkscreen?
 
Silkscreen was designed from scratch using Adobe Photoshop 5.02 and Macromedia Fontographer 3.52 on Windows NT 4.0.
 
First I used the pencil tool in Photoshop to draw all of the letters. For each character, I tried to make it as skinny and short as I could. It turned out that the largest characters were 5x5 pixels (not counting the ascenders and descenders), but most were 4x5 pixels. After drawing out each character, I played around with different letterforms on several characters before finalizing each one. Then I formed the characters into short sentences to determine the spacing for each character.
 
After all the characters were designed in Photoshop, I drew the fonts by hand in Fontographer. I could have imported the letters as bitmaps, but I wanted to make Silkscreen as precise as possible and also wanted to learn as much as I could about Fontographer. When the characters were finished for all four fonts, I generated Windows TrueType versions of them.
 
I then sent the Windows TrueType versions to Ray @ theMaxx for some conversion. Ray used his copy of Fontographer to make Mac versions of Silkscreen. Thanks, Ray.

 

Why did you design Silkscreen?
 
I'm a big fan of small, bitmappy fonts. I've been using a font called Sevenet (derived from Joe Gillespie's excellent Mini7) for a while now, but I didn't quite like the look of it...too wide. I wanted a font that was narrower and included a bold version. Silkscreen Expanded followed from Silkscreen as an alternative with more spacing in between the letters. I intend to keep using Sevenet as a wider complement to Silkscreen.
 
I also designed Silkscreen to teach myself a little bit more about typography and Fontographer. I have infinitely more respect for real type designers who design real fonts (i.e. ones with curves). Compared to that, designing Silkscreen was a piece of cake. After all, there's only so many ways that you can draw a letter that's only 25 pixels square.

 

How is Silkscreen different than Mini7 and Sevenet?
 
Silkscreen is a narrower font than Mini7 and Sevenet. It also includes four fonts within a type family; Mini7 and Sevenet for the Mac have three each while Sevenet for Windows is only a single font. Neither version of Sevenet has a bold version.

 

How much does Silkscreen cost?
 
The Silkscreen type family is absolutely free for personal or corporate use. You can use it for any project you want (Web, print, or otherwise) without owing anyone a single penny. However, if you like the font and use it often, you could send me some small token of your appreciation. Or just send me an email detailing your appreciation (or disgust)...URLs to sites on which you've used Silkscreen would be welcome as well.

 

Is Silkscreen covered under the 0sil8 copyright notice?
 
Unfortunately not. Normally, you can take anything off of 0sil8 and call it your own. For various reasons, I would rather you didn't claim this font as your own work. You may use it or distribute it as a freeware font on your site, but just don't claim you made it. You may not modify and then redistribute this type family. You may, however, modify it for your own personal use. You also may not charge any money for this font. Parties wishing to charge for Silkscreen should contact me to set up terms.
 
The Silkscreen type family is © 1999 Jason Kottke.

 

What's the best way to use Silkscreen?
 
Silkscreen is best used in places where extremely small graphical display type is needed (duh!). The primary use is for navigational items (nav bars, menus, etc.). However, you can also use it for image captions and the like...wherever small type is needed. Silkscreen also works very well at large point sizes if you're looking for that chunky, old school computer look so popular with the kids today.
 
In order to preserve the proper spacing and letterforms, Silkscreen should be used at 8pt. multiples (8pt., 16pt., 24pt., etc.) with anti-aliasing turned off. For larger text (larger than 64pt.), you can use whatever size you want without too much of a problem.
 
Unfortunately for those of us who like to work with small aliased type, Photoshop 5 is not good at working with such things (the kerning is very screwed up). A nifty work-around for this problem is to code an HTML document with a stylesheet using the desired typeface at the desired point size. Then plop whatever text you want in between the font tags and display it in your browser. After that, just take a screenshot of your browser and you've got the desired text (with the correct kerning, courtesy of the browser) in Photoshop. Here's an example that you can download that contains the stylesheet for Silkscreen and some sample text.
 
(Incidentally, Photoshop 5.5 fixes the kerning problems with small, aliased type....among other things.)

 

What characters are included in Silkscreen?
 
All of the standard US keyboard characters are present in the four fonts of the Silkscreen type family. No extended characters are present at this time.

 

Why are there no lowercase letters?
 
I didn't do any lowercase letters for Silkscreen because I wanted to preserve the nice, clean horizontal presentation of the font. Lowercase letters would have thrown a bunch of descenders in there and screwed it all up.

 

Why are some of the bold characters not legible?
 
Silkscreen was designed to be as narrow as possible as a non-bold font. When I went to design the bold version, some of the characters were unrecognizable because of that narrowness. Rather than tinkering with the design the bolded characters of the font to make them more legible, I left them the way they were. Experimentation with various sentence structures after I had completed the fonts showed that context took care of any readability issues.

 

Any plans for additions to the Silkscreen type family?
 
At some point, I might craft a lowercase version of Silkscreen as well as a version with varient letter forms. I'd like to do a monospaced version as well, but I don't know how well that would work for a font of this type.