# Helena Zhang: Font Design, Retro/Pixel Art, and More! 👾 by [kirupa](https://www.kirupa.com/me/index.htm) | filed under [Interviews with Creative People](https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm) [Helena Zhang](http://departuremono.com) uses Departure Mono as a window into how strong constraints can sharpen design. What starts as a conversation about a pixel monospace font grows into a richer discussion about reference hunting, language support, sci-fi interfaces, tool choice, and the wider creative world around pixel art, icons, and type. Watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE A conversation with **Helena Zhang** | 1h 03m ## About this conversation Helena Zhang makes design process feel concrete in the best way. The episode opens with Departure Mono, but it quickly becomes a broader conversation about how a project gains shape through constraints. A pixel font is already a narrow brief. Choosing to make it monospaced narrows it further, yet Helena shows how that kind of boundary can actually make experimentation easier. Instead of treating constraints as compromises, she treats them as working rules that help a style become usable, distinctive, and coherent. The most useful sections stay close to the craft. Helena talks through the earlier proportional version of the font, the practical advantages of moving to monospace, and the extra complexity that appears once you care about diacritics, script support, and real-world use beyond a single visual stunt. That makes Departure Mono feel less like a novelty release and more like a living design system. There is an attention to spacing, coverage, and maintenance that people outside type design can still appreciate, because the underlying question is universal: how do you turn a striking idea into something other people can reliably use? Just as interesting is the network of references behind the work. Helena walks through visual inspiration that spans early websites, paper ephemera, sci-fi film interfaces, NASA material, foundry specimens, and contemporary pixel art. Later, the conversation gets into tooling with Glyphs and the translation from sketch to working font. By the end, the episode becomes a compact lesson in creative taste. Good design is not only about drawing forms. It is also about collecting influences, setting useful limits, and knowing which details deserve far more attention than anyone outside the craft might guess. ## What you'll hear about - Constraints can make a design project clearer and more original. - Monospace was a practical decision, not just a visual preference. - Language support and diacritics can reshape the core structure of a font. - Reference material matters because taste grows from what you study closely. - Tooling helps, but judgment is what turns a visual idea into a usable system. ## Jump to a topic - [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=0s) **Why Departure Mono Stands Out**: Kirupa introduces Helena Zhang and frames the conversation around a pixel font with real design ambition. - [2:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=120s) **Early Web and Design Habits**: Helena looks back at building websites young and the self-taught curiosity that pushed her into design. - [9:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=540s) **Mapping the Influences**: She walks through the visual references that shaped Departure Mono and the larger world around it. - [11:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=660s) **Why Pixel Plus Monospace**: The discussion turns to constraints, the shift from proportional design, and why monospace solved real problems. - [22:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=1320s) **Designing for Wider Use**: Helena explains the work involved in supporting diacritics, more scripts, and broader practical use cases. - [34:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2040s) **Retro-Futurist Taste**: Sci-fi films, interface history, and visual culture come together as major influences on the project's mood. - [44:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2640s) **From Sketch to Font File**: They get into Glyphs, grid work, and the actual process of turning visual ideas into a usable typeface. - [56:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3360s) **Pixel Art Beyond Nostalgia**: The closing stretch broadens into contemporary pixel art, animation, and where Helena might explore next. ## To learn more - [Helena's Departure Mono](http://departuremono.com) - [Helena's Phosphor Icons](http://phosphoricons.com) ## Transcript The automatically generated captions have been organized by speaker, lightly edited for clarity, and broken into paragraphs for readability. Names and wording may still contain errors. ### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=0s) - Kirupa Hi everybody. Today I chat with Helena Zhang. Helena is a very talented designer whose expertise and interests span a variety of areas. Most of you know that I love all things related to pixel art. Recently, Helena created the fantastic font Departure Mono. Yes, it's a pixel font. Yes, it's also monospaced, which means it is flexible for a lot of use cases, and it looks really cool. When I dug deeper into it and realized Helena was behind it, I wanted to chat with her more to learn about her design interests and also touch upon a topic I am not very familiar with, which is what goes into creating a font. In this very visual chat, Helena shares a mind map of all the inputs that went into designing and creating Departure Mono, and along the way we touch upon a bunch of other topics, including some of the pixel-art-inspired content that has been popular across a variety of mediums over the past few decades. This is going to be a blast and a fun chat, so you don't want to miss it. Let's get started. All right, Helena, it is great to chat with you. In the introduction I talked about Departure Mono, the pixel font you created, which introduced me to your work. Digging into your work a little bit more, I realized that you have a lot of really interesting things that you've been working on and are currently working on. So I figured let's chat and learn more about yourself, definitely how Departure Mono came about, and, of course, touch upon a billion other topics along the way. So welcome. ### [1:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=89s) - Helena Zhang Thank you so much, Kirupa. Thanks for having me. ### [1:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=91s) - Kirupa So how did you get started? Let's go all the way back in time, because I'm always curious how people got into this world of tech given the millions of options that have always existed. It takes real passion to want to work in this area and then dive deep enough to not just make a career out of it, but also contribute back to the larger ecosystem. So I want to go back in time and ask what motivated you to get into this fun world? ### [1:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=118s) - Helena Zhang Yeah, we can go way back. I was always an artsy kid, and I remember at a very young age going to the bookstore and kind of camping out in the graphic design section. I was really into that, so I was voraciously absorbing all the books there. On the digital side, I started making websites when I was 11 or 12. I started tinkering with HTML and such and just kind of had fun with it. At that time the patterns weren't defined yet, so it was kind of a playground for me to try different things. You can still see that thread because I'm still making websites today. Fast forward a little bit from then: I went to art school, found some of that stuff pretentious, and luckily I always had design in my background. ### [2:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=172s) - Kirupa When you were building websites, what do you remember? What tools were you using? ### [2:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=176s) - Helena Zhang In the very beginning it was just pure HTML. Actually, that was before CSS came out, so I'm dating myself a bit, but it was very, very simple and I was just seeing what I could do with that. Of course there was GeoCities. I remember I had a GeoCities site. I would pay a lot of money to see my early websites now, but I don't really have a good capture of them. And then I know you were really into Flash. I wasn't so much a Flash person or into all the ActionScript stuff, but I do remember what I would call the Squarespace of Flash. It was called Moonfruit, and you could set up your own website very quickly there. Those were fun times. ### [3:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=225s) - Kirupa Yeah. Looking backwards, it was probably for the best that you did not get into Flash, because your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills are still very relevant today. For a lot of us who were deep in the Flash world, the visual knowledge still matters, but a lot of the tribal knowledge we gained from it is pretty much lost in time. ### [4:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=244s) - Helena Zhang Well, you never know, maybe there's going to be a Resurgence, or you know, of nostalgia in the air very much. So a lot of people keep pinging me and saying there's a tool called ruffle which turns your old Flash files into WebAssembly that runs natively in your browser. So there's a Resurgence of a lot of people actually using Adobe Animate, and some people even have old versions of Flash lying around that they managed to get working on their modern versions of macOS and Windows and actually have content that's being created now. I think the gaming community is really huge into Flash, because that's always been a big place that Flash is relevant in, but I'm seeing more and more ruffle links on various things I see around me. So, who knows, there may be a Resurgence of it, but I think the it's not going to be as influential, though, as it was back in the day. Right. ### [4:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=291s) - Kirupa So from there, you created the icon library first. What was the motivation behind creating Phosphor Icons? I'm looking at the icons, and there are a lot of them. Having done one icon in my entire lifetime, which is my orange logo, I know it takes a lot of effort and a lot of consideration. So I'm curious: what was the initial genesis of the idea, and what led you to go all the way and create icons for so many common scenarios? ### [5:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=322s) - Helena Zhang Sure, yes. I'm going to scroll through. Can you see the site right now? ### [5:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=325s) - Kirupa Yes, I can. ### [5:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=326s) - Helena Zhang Okay, I'm going to scroll through just to set some context for people on what this is and what it looks like. There are, I think there's like n over 9000 icons to date and it's growing. There's, you know, different weights that you have. This started during the pandemic and yeah, I think when you know you have a little bit of space, like that and you're, I was stuck at home and you know, this kind of just came about, just started tinkering with it. Iconography is something I always worked on, on all my projects, so I would really roll my own icons for whatever company I was working for, whatever client and you know, I think it's a pretty underserved area. I do think it's changing a lot recently. I'm seeing a lot of Icon designers working and a lot of people, you know, making their own icons and a lot of Education around it too. But I think previously it seemed like, you know, typography is, it was, it is more of the leading element in a design, usually, but I think icons are pretty underserved and sometimes you just you know, it isn't given as much thought. So, that's something I always cared about because I care about all the details. You know, I think everything matters in whatever you're building and designing. So always had it interested in them and then, given a little bit of time during the pandemic I- this was something I started up with my partner, and it's. You know, one thing we care about a lot is offering it in a lot of different formats. So you know there's a figma library plug-in sketch. It's available in react view, lots of different ways. You can use it both for designers and developers, and you know we work hard to maintain that. And then we also work hard to take in requests. You know, I think at this point, because it's quite large, it's probably serving a lot of the use cases that are needed, but we still get you. You know we take requests through GitHub issues and then, we'll kind of sort through them and see like what would be good, what would be something that's good to add, and if something's too Niche, we might not go there. ### [7:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=462s) - Kirupa But yeah, when I looked at Archive. Org for your icons, the first version of the site, I think at least, was from October of 2020, and you had 3000 icons. Now you have, as mentioned, over 9000. Did you wait to get all 3000 icons before you decided to share them with the public, or did you have earlier versions that you shared in smaller sizes? ### [8:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=486s) - Helena Zhang Yeah, I think I'm trying to remember the first release. I believe we had 588 icons times six weights, so that whatever that comes out to, maybe it's 3000. We did, I think we did, you know, decide to come out with like a solid set before before releasing the first version, you know, maybe enough to really cover the most common cases of, like search icon settings, things like that, and then it kind of Grew From there. ### [8:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=521s) - Kirupa Very cool. Now I know you created a mind map in Figma that walks through not just Departure Mono, but also the inspiration behind how you got there. I feel like this would be a good segue into that, because I think it covers a lot of the things I think you and I want to talk about as well. ### [9:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=540s) - Helena Zhang Sure, yeah. I can give a quick overview just to set the scene of what we're looking at, and for the people listening who don't have the luxury of being at a screen right now. We're looking at this kind of mind map, a big graph with a lot of different nodes, where we have Departure Mono, the font that I recently released, and then a lot of the inspiration that went behind it. At a very high level, there are sci-fi reference movies, film references, NASA, paper ephemera, which I really love collecting, vintage ephemera, type foundries, specimen sites, and lots of this kind of stuff. You can probably find the influence in the Departure Mono website. And then, in creating the font itself, I looked at a lot of monospace fonts, since that was one of the constraints, and programming fonts, because I wanted it to be useful for programmers. Then there was everything else from video games and pixel art. It is a pixel font, so pixel art is very related territory, and even going back to things like MacPaint and making pixel art there. So there are a lot of areas we could talk about. Let me know where you want to start. ### [10:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=631s) - Kirupa Well, let's start the very beginning. What made you decide to create a new font and more specifically, a monospaced pixel font? ### [10:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=637s) - Helena Zhang Right, yes, it's very specific. I've always wanted to make a font, and I just never really got around to it. It took me a while to sit down and start. I began Departure Mono about two years ago, and doing a pixel font felt like a great entry point into making fonts, especially because this was my first one. Giving yourself a constraint like that is really helpful when you're learning all the ins and outs of what it takes to make a font, along with the tools and everything else that comes with it. I think it was a really great constraint. We could get into this more, but I've always been drawn to pixel art and pixel fonts, so I used that as my starting constraint. Actually, the first version two years ago was not monospace. It was a proportional font, which means each letter takes up its own width. It also had a smaller grid, so I was working with an even tighter grid and having trouble with things like diacritics. I'll zoom in to give you a sense of that. This is the grid for Departure Mono that I ended up with, and you can see you need a little room if you want to include accents like an acute or if you need space for descenders, like in the letter Q. So there was a lot of working through what the grid should be and what that looked like once you actually typed it out in a sentence or paragraph. The monospace version came a little later, partly through input from my partner and other folks who felt it would be more useful if it could support things like coding in Departure Mono. So I made that change when I revisited it, and it worked out. It also saved me a lot of kerning, by the way, because if you do a proportional font, you have to deal with different pairs and combinations of letters. So in terms of an entry point, the two constraints—a pixel font and a monospace font—were really useful. After that it was a lot of trial and error, learning details, and doing research into other fonts in this family. ### [13:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=804s) - Kirupa This may be a very basic question: what is kerning? ### [13:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=808s) - Helena Zhang So kerning is the spacing between two letters. Let's say between an A and a B, for example. That is the specific spacing between those two letters. Tracking is the spacing across something like a whole paragraph. You can track something a little tighter, or you can say you want it to be looser, or wider, and then you can space it out a little more. ### [14:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=855s) - Kirupa Gotcha. And with proportional fonts, is kerning global for each letter, or do you have to special-case it? I've definitely seen cases where, say, two-letter combinations have different spacing than other combinations. So those are all things that, as a font designer, you have to think about and also specify in whatever format the font needs to be represented in, right? ### [14:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=878s) - Helena Zhang That's exactly right. It's special casing, which is- and that's what I was getting at in terms of the- you know the amount of work that goes into that. There's a lot of work that you know. You have a lot of. You kind of get your proofing texts and you have different cases that you test for and different pairings of letters, and it takes a lot of fine adjustment to make sure that it looks good. You, depending on you, know what two letters are paired together. ### [15:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=904s) - Kirupa How much of creating Departure Mono was about wanting to try what it takes to design a new font, versus feeling like there was a gap in existing pixel fonts that you wanted to address and move the state of the art forward? ### [15:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=918s) - Helena Zhang In, I think, a little bit of both. Like one was just the desire to try it out and learn about it, and, you know, really complete a project, there's a lot of reward in just, you know, learning how to do something, and then I do think there's probably, you know from what you see, that the end result of this probably answers some of the things that I found were missing, that you know there's tons of pixel fonts out there and there. You know there's a long history of pixel fonts, whether it's for video games or you know there was this phase in the around Y2K, like the early 2000s, I don't know if you remember the like tiny, tiny pixel fonts and it was like really tiny grids of like three to five pixels. Yeah, that was a really fun time, and so I think that's I definitely have a lot of nostalgic for that time, but I think there was a you know, if you look at that, by the way, the curing is all over the place and it's kind of, you know it's really, it's endearing in a way, but I think in terms of if we're thinking about usability and utility and, let's say, you did want to use it as a coding font. I think there was a lot of things missing there. So, you know, I was exploring, like when I was working through this. I think one of the considerations is how can I make it usable and, you know, reduce the amount of wonkiness that, you know, maybe some of those funds had, but still have a little bit of Personality, right, but, yeah, make it a little bit more usable, I think, for wider use cases. ### [16:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=1018s) - Kirupa Know makes a lot of sense to me and you know we can talk a little bit about what got you interested about pixel fonts in particular. You mentioned that there's a lot of inspiration and historical things that you wanted to kind of capture as part of creting this font. I spent a lot of time trying to find the right pixel font and especially in the flash community in the late 1990s, early 2000s, pixel fonts were great because Flash had this weird thing where the anti-alias everything for the most part to a point where it's like extremely blurry. It was nice for larger text, but for small text it was almost unreadable. So what a lot of people did was they said the quality in Flash to low, which meant that anti-aliasing would be turned off, which unfortunately also meant all Vector shapes would also be Jagged and have the sharp edges, and that became an art style of itself. I don't know if you ever followed- like you know I think it is Yugo Nakamura- praystation and some of those other kinds of like early generative art experiments they did back in the day- I think Yugo P was the actual website- and a lot of those experiments were very simple in terms of this lines, but the lines were in, you know, exported low quality, so it created this really artificial kind of an effect, and so all those pixel fonts were the only solution he had for having nice, you know, curvy, vectorized shapes that weren't Jagged but had text that was very, very legible. So lot of fonts you mentioned very. I still have probably a folder of like at least hundreds of megabytes of ttf files from back then because it's hard to find, like the huge fonts h, o, g and then the standard underscore ones, and then I think there were a handful of ones you know, try to find at some point. But the S screen was a classic as well. That was, yeah, Jason Cy and I actually tried using S screen for my current pixel fonts that I use on my website today. I tried with, started off with Sil screen and I went with something else, mostly because S screen is, I think, only all caps and I needed something to be like both lowercase and all caps as well that also wasn't massive in file size. You know I was like: how can we make sure the fonts are less than about 10, 20 kilobytes in size? And all the other ones I was able to find were often in 100 kilobytes, which I it makes doesn't matter today for many people, but I've always been a stickler for how can we make things be as fast and performant as possible, and so this is. So when I found out about your font, I was like I have to try this out, and so I haven't had a chance to do that yet, but my plan is actually put it to that works on on my own personal blog and see how it all plays out. And my interest in pixel art in general is mostly this: video games. You know, I grew up playing the NES initially, and then when the Super Nintendo came out, it was like Mega Man X and also the Zelda links to the Past, like a classic old school game from that era, and all the iconography and text was very much pixel oriented, and that was pretty much it, and so ever since then I've always made my site's logo actually know pixel text itself. And then I tried to incorporate pixel art and pixel things for a long time, and when Rea displays came into the picture, I couldn't use it anymore because on every screen pixel icons and pixel things were blurry, because the dpis were off and I just didn't know enough about dpis and icon sizes and so on to be able to do a proper job with it. But five years ago in CSS they add the ability to actually have the rendering mode be in pixel format itself, so even you had images that were different sizes, it would not anti-alias anymore, and that, I think, in some ways brought back this resurgence of pixel style visuals in everyday websites again. And that's what got me back into pixel art after having kind of abandoned it for many years because nobody could use it and see it in a way that would make sense. ### [20:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=1244s) - Helena Zhang Yeah, there's a lot there to dig into. I'm I'm in this video game area now of the, of the mindmap, but you know things. I mean all the way back to things like arcanoid, which you can see in the departure mono site, but also the. Yeah, I think there today there's a Resurgence. Well, this is. This is probably 10 years old. How old is Minecraft? But, yeah, probably 10 or more. Yeah, yeah, maybe 10, so maybe not so fresh, but there are newer references of you know people using pixel fonts and you know, I think this Minecraft is a great example where they, yeah, they've kind of brought it back a little bit here. And I think I'm just feeling a lot of excitement from the industry too on the on Pixel stuff and yeah, I'm excited to see what what people make with that. I want to go back to silk screen, which you mentioned, one of the. This is one of the fonts I remember from back in the day and, yeah, I loved it. It was very small. I think the- let's see what the height is here. Five, it's only five pixels tall. That's really small to work with. As you mentioned, it's all caps, so that was one of the constraints, right like that, or limitations, I should say. That, I think departure mono tries to answer like: okay, there's, it's a full alphabet, uppercase, lower case, different Latin languages, including different diacritics, and now I'm currently working on expanding it to ceric as well, which I don't- I'm not familiar with this, so I'm actually, you know, working with the community to work on that and test it. But that is. Yeah, I think that's important for me for this F is that it can be usable for a lot of people and a lot of different use cases. And, you know, if I'm able to expand the languages, great, I think the grid is probably too small for something like Chinese, but yeah, we'll see what happens with that. But, you know, I think expanding it to cilc and then Greek as well. There's some basic Greek in there, but, it would be great to make that a little bit more. Fully supported. ### [22:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=1375s) - Kirupa Yeah, and you know, five pixels today seems like very small, but always feel like- at least my fuzzy recollection of the time back then- was that a lot of our monitors were maybe 1024- 768 was like the most common resolution and if you maybe had like 1280 by 1024, if you had like a more recent monitor. But I felt like in those days five pixels was actually not that small. I was like, okay, that's pretty, you know reasonably size, and I think all had to be like multiples of eight anyway. So your font size had to be eight pixels or 16 or 24, and I don't know if that was different though for S screen, like was it multiples of five? I forget those details at this point. ### [23:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=1411s) - Helena Zhang That's a good point actually, because if you know, if you're looking at Old, well, this is like some old MacPaint references. But this screen was probably something like 64, 640 by three I'm going to, but you're it 480 or something you know it's. It didn't actually need to it. I guess one pixel took up more space, so. ### [23:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=1433s) - Kirupa Yeah, which is a which is a challenge, of course, as I highlighted earlier, of using some of fonts from back in the day. In today's time is that little things that have just evolved in terms of how fonts and text are rendered kind of goes counter to how that is done. Nice, k10k classic. Yeah, this has been, this has been coming up a lot. I don't know if you felt this, but people are talk, people are talking about caliber 10K a lot, see, like, yeah, I mean all so all the pixel details here, it was all all pixels. There was this personality. I look at K and K at least like once every couple of months, mostly because I just want to kind of go back to like what was you know, what was? What do we kind of lose in like the evolution of design since then and what do we gain? As well as a part of it- and I always felt k1k was a as a great example of it- and also their, their sisters, I think Cuban Council, I think that was the, I think the cre k k had Cuban Council running at the same time, and I think there was Ultra shck was the pixel. Like you know that a heavy pixel related content as well. But you know, this is all really fun things to see and most of there images. You know, I think today we can actually create a lot of this using just CSS, but they literally there was no CSS positioning anything like that back then. So all these were like nine grid tables, where you literally had nine cells in a table and then you put images in each section to create this like Rich border. That worked, because it didn't work in modern browsers or old browsers. ### [25:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=1528s) - Helena Zhang Yeah, yeah, a lot more. It was a lot more, that went into it. ### [25:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=1533s) - Kirupa By the way, what did you so? You mentioned there were some things that maybe we lost and some things that we gained. What do you think those things are? I think the thing we lost was personality. Every website they see today tends to follow a very similar pattern. You know, there's like, let's say, there's like eight different templates of how a hero hero page should look like, or how a call to action should be optimized for, and so on, and the bigger difference is like maybe it's gradient versus solid color and things like that. But every website looks very similar to every other website and if I would kind of squin my eyes, I'm like this site looks the same as this site, the same as the other one, and I felt back then I think there was no real established patterns in terms of how things should be done. Now I'm not going to say that K andk probably hit all the right bars in terms of usability, accessibility and things like that, and so I think those are some of the things that could have been improved from the websites from that era, but the amount of sheer uniqueness of it was very much something that I feel like we lost, cuz I noticed that you also have habo Hotel here and I wased H Hotel actually last week just to see, like what's going on there, because that was one of the first experience I ever had of like something done in the browser. That was one I could create my own room. I didn't have to do anything extra for it, and then people could come see my room and I could just navigate randomly and I would be interacting with actual people that were doing things, because the only other example I had was Microsoft had a chat application in the late 1990s. It was called was called Microsoft Chat, and there had two modes of how you can connect to an IRC server. You could chat in text as usual, or you could create this fake comic strip, and that fake comic strip had, like, different characters you can choose and so on, and I found all this to be like early versions of What ultimately became Myspace and social media, of we personalizing an experience that is different for every individual, because most then it was just you just got what the developer said you're getting, and so those were early examples of it. That always stuck in my head as something that was very, very nicely done. And, of course, habo hotel is like classic because it also reminded me of Zelda Link to the Past. ### [27:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=1654s) - Helena Zhang Yeah, I haven't thought about this in a long time, actually, but I came across it again while working on this font. They still maintain that old style. There was another website competing with Habbo Hotel that I completely forgot the name of. It was very similar in style, but much larger, and it wasn't fully pixelated. It used a lot of vector shapes that showed up as nicely anti-aliased vectors. If I can remember it, I'll try to bring it up. I think it had a. Uk domain name, but that's too far for me to reach into my memory right now. It is really interesting to think about, though. ### [28:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=1694s) - Kirupa Yeah, when you think about it, this is the modern reference that comes to mind. It has so much of Habbo Hotel in it. I don't know if you've used this tool before. ### [28:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=1704s) - Helena Zhang I have. ### [28:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=1705s) - Kirupa Where you can basically join a meeting like we are now, and each person has an avatar that can walk around the space. It has a really cool audio component where, if I walk close to you, it starts the video and audio. It's kind of simulating being in an office. ### [28:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=1728s) - Helena Zhang I have actually used it. I didn't realize it at first, but I just went to the website now and recognized it. We used it for some team events a while back. We were all walking around this virtual environment and chatting with people when we got close to them. ### [29:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=1749s) - Kirupa Nice. That's very cool. And when you look at indie games, the games built by one or two people or very small teams, pixel art is still all the rage. I see it in so many places as the primary way they communicate what's going on. ### [29:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=1766s) - Helena Zhang Yeah, yeah, I mean, started value was made by one person, right? I think so. I think so, yeah, very beautifully done. But yeah, what you were saying about, I think you know a lot of people in the industry are feeling this way that you know we have, we maybe lost some of the personality or just weirdness of websites back in the day, before we had figured things out, and we gained a lot of, you know, let's say, accessibility is one area right where, definitely, those tiny pixel fonts were not accessible back in the day, so there's, there is a lot that we gained and I think it's, you know, it's as, as it has matured, it has, you know, we've. We've gotten better at some things like that and but I also will say it's really up to us to bring some of that back right and, just because there are you, there are established patterns and maybe every website has like a header that's centered, but you don't have to do that, and I think one one reference, I'll point to that this was probably the biggest inspiration behind the departure mono specimen site, gly type. This type Foundry puts out the best mini sites for their different fonts. So this is not the best representation because it's static screenshots, but, you know, if you were to go to, I think I can actually probably just pull one up. This is a new one that they that they released, just yesterday actually, and I'll just give you a preview of like oh, wow it's. You know, it's incredibly fun. It's a beautiful Showcase of their type faces and, you know, not everyone loves the scrolly telling where you're telling the story and you're kind of like controlling the scrolling. Yeah, effects, but yeah, I think this has so much personality, it's so wonderful. It's such a great way to show off a font. No, very much. So very nicely done, I think. When you get back to like. ### [31:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=1905s) - Kirupa Also, what was it about websites back then that had more personality than they do right now? I think today it's just harder to build a website with personality and a distinct style. For example, as you're scrolling, having that kind of storytelling come into play is hard to do unless you're very technical. And if you're using a low-code tool like Webflow to make it work, you can do it, but you may be sacrificing page size. Some of these examples might be 10, 20, or 30 megabytes. Then you go to Apple's site and look at some of their really nice hero graphics and scrolling effects, and those can be 20, 30, or 40 megabytes too. So maybe the industry hasn't fully figured out how to make these experiences work in a way where your search scores and all those other metrics aren't negatively impacted. But I think we'll get there. It's always a pendulum where what's old becomes cool again. We're at a point now where the technical capabilities to make pixel art and pixel content look good in the browser are available, and we're also getting designers who are looking back and borrowing the good parts of that era while combining them with what we've learned since then about usability, accessibility, and performance. That feels like the next generation of evolved pixel art. You also have a collection of movies that were a big inspiration, which I found really interesting, because a lot of movies, even ones made today, use pixel art and definitely pixel fonts to highlight things that are either very technical or deliberately designed to have a retro vibe. ### [33:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2013s) - Helena Zhang Yeah, let's see there's. There's so many what can I zoom into as a starting point? Well, okay, so I've recently I've been binging X Files and this- this is, this is a great reference of you know very 9s you can see, actually, this screenshot I pulled has a pixel font here and I feel like every time they're writing their mission reports, they're there's a different font and interface going on. So that's been really cool to just see what, what kinds of things they come up with. This looks very dossy. And yeah, let's see what else we got here. I mean some of my favorites, I think the alien franchise, I love those movies. Alien- the best one is the original, of course, of course, yes, of course. This is a screenshot from you know there's. There's a lot of inspiration to be taken from their interfaces back then. Space Odyssey still stands up really well, so definitely recommend that. I mean, look at this screenshot where they're, they're eating and they're. These look like iPads and this was made in 1968. That's pretty incredible. So I think for me, there were, there were. These were more broadly sci-fi references and not necessarily pixel specific spefically, but you can see, I think a lot of them do overlap right, because you tend to be working with, let's say, constrained interfaces where you're working with kind of Pixy looks. So this is from, Blade Runner 2049- also one of my favorites Blade Runner. And then I would say G monk is really the G monk is the master of this, these kind of sci-fi interfaces. This is from Oblivion and it's this just like gorgeous, really dense layout here,. And then there's- there was like a whole table. You know this kind of like big, big table UI that they had in the in the movie. ### [35:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2150s) - Kirupa Yeah, did you ever watched a Fallout TV series? The recent one. ### [35:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2158s) - Helena Zhang Yeah yes I did. ### [35:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2158s) - Kirupa And the video game side of Fallout was always funny to me because it's set in this futuristic time, hundreds of years after the world supposedly ended in nuclear annihilation. But because the world ended at that point, all the screens are low-res, so all the UI in the game, and in the TV show too, is pixel styled. They did a nice job blending past and future and using pixel art in all the places where it made sense to represent retro technology. ### [36:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2206s) - Helena Zhang Exactly. It's like the. The UI language was stuck in the 50s, but they had nuclear powered everything. So, like cars are like fly- I don't know if they're flying cars, but they were self-- powerered. You had robots that could do all kinds of things because they Advanced so much in some of these areas. Yet their UI language was very much what we would consider to be like late 60s, early 70s. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think there's actually something, there's a, there's an observation to be made there, because we have all of this, you know, if you think today we have all of these Advanced Technologies and yet you go, you know, you're, you take a flight and you're, you have this like a paper, paper boarding pass. That's, like you know, printed in a very low-fi way. So I think that was some of the. I think that theme I was playing with here too. It's like for the website for departure mono. There's a story: you know this astronaut or scientist is going to space, Dr kerning- and then, you know, was getting some sort of brief, and then, you know, going to the airport and or that, really this, the airport that is Maybe Spaceport, and, like you know, going to space and then yet you know you have all this technology of going to space and yet you're dealing with, like, paper receipts and stuff like that. So, you know, I think that contrast is kind of a real thing in our, in our world, and, something that's fun to play with, also in terms of, like, having analog elements here as well as very digital, very digital elements as well. ### [38:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2303s) - Kirupa The word analog is critical here. I was reading an article recently about how vinyl record sales continue to go up year over year because people are getting back into both buying record players and buying music on vinyl. There's something nice about it. People say the audio quality is significantly better because of the compression, if your ears are capable of discerning between compressed audio and a really high-quality original. There was almost a movement where we wanted to go digital, leave the past behind as quickly as we could, and embrace what new technology was able to provide. But now that the dust has settled a bit, we're recognizing that some things done back then in technology were actually quite appealing, and their visual language came along with them. You now have this blending of old versus new, which creates the UI here and on the Departure Mono webpage. I absolutely love it because you didn't go all pixel art everywhere. Some icons and visuals, like a pen or marker, are still very much vector-based, while the surrounding content is very pixel-oriented. It's a nice blending of what would look good in pixel form and what would look better in natural vector form. That was a nice mixture between what you're trying to balance. ### [39:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2386s) - Helena Zhang Yeah, thank you. I was definitely playing around with both visual languages here, especially the patterning and the almost QR-code-like evidence of geothermal activity. ### [40:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2401s) - Kirupa I've seen glitch textures making a comeback in so many ways too. Back then, if you saw a glitch texture, you'd think the designer just made a mistake. Now people actively seek it out. They want 4K textures that are basically just glitches like this printed out, and there's a lot of fun stuff there. ### [40:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2421s) - Helena Zhang Yeah, yeah, this is, this is. I'm feeling a trend around this kind of stuff too. I've seen some dithering tools being worked on and there, this, these are actually made with just the shading characters, in the font. So that was something that was fun too, was like, you know, challenging myself to only use, aside from these Vector elements, you can see, there's some flat, like you mentioned, this highlighter, and then some of these backgrounds, right like the paper. Those are vector and then, aside from that, everything is departure mono. So even this texture here in this ID and here these are just using the font to this is like showing a, I guess, a photo from the newspaper clipping and then yeah, so that was really fun to play around with. Oh, yeah, here too, in the boarding pass, there's a little bit of texture. So, yep, yep, actually was it k10k. There used to be websites where you could download background patterns that you know that tiled essentially, and you'd see something very similar to this, and a lot of them were in art form. Yeah, ah, there you have something. Yeah, I remember that there's some. There's a lot of good. You know a lot of stuff to get into with with patterns and everything from. These are my personal references that I collect these security patterns inside envelopes. If you look in there, you know, there's some really beautiful ones, like this wood grainy one, yeah, and yeah, there's an AI tool that came out, I think, probably last couple of weeks. Actually, where was all really about? How do you create dithered images from it? And, yeah, the way I always, like you know, when I talk to some, you know friends who weren't around back in the day to do design and things like that. You know I was explaining like one of the easiest ways I had back then to create something similar to this was fireworks was a great tool back then and you could always export as a gift and choose number of colors you wanted to be able to export the image as, and so if you kept it as a high number, then the image would be more pH realistic, as best it can be. But if you went down like four colors or two colors, the algorithm had to figure out how do I take all these pixels and simplify down to one or two colors? The output almost always would be pixel art. You know, even for more traditional things because you only had two colors. So be giant blocks, it' be geometric in terms: there no circles. Because you had circles, you needed some kind of anti-aliasing, which you couldn't get with just two colors, so it would always just deferred to only block designs and I said that was the fastest way back then. So all the things that you're doing right now, I've had it back then. But you know, no one knows about it because people use fireworks that fire. The product has been discontinued for a long time and I don't even think it works on any modern operating system anymore. Yeah, but it's a similar idea to how you would achieve this fact today. Right, like you would, you would bring it into your software and, like, flatten out the number of, or flatten it to bit map and flatten out the number of colors and such. So, yeah, this definitely more Advanced, though, because I don't think fireworks would have known to adjust the spacing of various values to create the visual effect of like maybe a gradient for the sky. It would have just been very binary. You know is there. Does the pixel have certain colors, be on a certain threshold? If it doesn't, it's just white, otherwise it's going to be black. So in this case, the what fire would printed would have been the bridge and some of the key shapes would have been visible, but everything would been like solid white. Yeah, it's definitely more advanced today. For sure, this article is one, by the way, it has it goes through different. You know there's different kinds of algorithms right for dithering and you could do it in different ways. There's not like one way to do it so you can. There's different results. You can produce different kinds of noise. That that you can, you know, achieve. So, yeah, this is great, very, very cool. ### [44:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2657s) - Kirupa Now when it comes to fonts, I've always been a consumer of fonts, but I've never actually created my own. What tool do you use to create the font? How do you take a visual idea and translate it into something your computer understands as a font? ### [44:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2678s) - Helena Zhang I use glyphs, there, there's various tools out there, I found glyphs really actually I love it. It's very intuitive to use. I can give you a quick preview here. So, for, because this is a pixel font, I think I largely worked directly in the canvas here. I did do, I did a few, you know, paper sketches on grided paper, to kind of work out like, yeah, how big is the grid, and questions like that, and so I think probably it would be a combination of you know, sketching and then and then working within the software and, in this case, you can, you can see the pixels here, directly, very neat, and you essentially have the same kind of view for every letter or character you're trying to generate and then glyph that the app takes care of putting them all into a format, you know, whatever the font format is, and having it be recognized by your operating system. Yeah, there's pretty robust exporting features here, there's a lot of like Advanced Automation and things you can do and, depending, you know, depending on what you're trying to do, there's like you can make a variable font in here there's a lot of stuff. ### [45:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2758s) - Kirupa How long did it take for you, end to end, to come up with the idea and actually draw the pixels for each character you were going to represent? ### [46:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2769s) - Helena Zhang So I started this project about two years ago and I worked on it a little bit. Probably I might have picked it up in the middle somewhere. And then, you know, more recently, this year is when I finished it, and if I were to map it to a, an a full-time job, it might be around 2 months, including the website, but that's not, that's not an, that's not an accurate way to say it, right, because the breaks in between are important. So, you know, having being able to walk away and really, like you know, it's like I can't see this anymore, let me walk away, and then, I come back to it and so, yeah, the, the breaks were important, but I think, all in all, my time spent in this software is probably, you know, not not so long. ### [46:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2817s) - Kirupa Yeah, I mean, as you can see, that's one of the best ways to be creative, so that works out really well. ### [47:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2823s) - Helena Zhang Yeah, definitely. Letting your mind wander and being able to see something fresh again is one of the hardest parts of making anything. At a certain point you just can't see it anymore, and you can't even tell whether it's good or not. Giving yourself a little bit of space is important. ### [47:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2844s) - Kirupa Yeah, I noticed that you have eBoy listed there as part of it. One of my colleagues very recently had eBoy posters in the background and we ended up having a great conversation about what we lost in that kind of art style, since you just don't really see it much anymore except through them. ### [47:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2867s) - Helena Zhang Yeah, there's definitely a lot of different pixel art happening these days. This is a very particular style, and I love the isometric look and the really fun bright colors. I'm sure somebody is still doing it. It's just that discovering things like that can be hard, and sometimes you have to go down a few rabbit holes. ### [48:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2896s) - Kirupa Yeah, and I just wake up some days wondering what that one website was that I remember from 20 years ago and completely forgot. One of them was a site where people built floors of an apartment, kind of a crowdsourced thing, stacking them on top of each other into this giant scrolling page. I think it was called Mr. Wong's apartment, and mrwong. De was the URL. ### [48:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2932s) - Helena Zhang Yeah, it's live, it's live, yeah. Let me send it to you. I'll send it to you. There's a chat right here, so let me see. But I think if you just search for mrwong. De, you'll see it. ### [49:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=2953s) - Kirupa Oh, the website. The homepage is exactly the way it was back in the day. The splash pages. I forgot about that. Yep, 2003. All right, wow, it's still live. I'm trying to figure out how to get to the apartments themselves from there. This also shows what you were saying earlier about how narrow our websites were back then. Now my resolution is so big that the site doesn't even cover half the screen. ### [50:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3002s) - Helena Zhang But if you want, you can go to the URL bar and just do /myhouse instead of index1. Htm, and then you'll see the next page right away. ### [50:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3019s) - Kirupa The funny thing is that I can see the names of some people who posted there, and many of them are people from back then who did a lot of pixel art. Wow, this is really cool. I don't know whether I remember this, but I should be there somewhere because I created a few floors, submitted them, and was featured here as well. This was when I had a lot of free time to create pixel art just for fun. Look how long the scroll is. It was amazing. I remember this inspiring me to create my own pixel city in exactly the same format. People could crowdsource the pixel art. I basically had plots of land that people would claim for themselves for free, and then they could create the land as well. If you search for Kirupa—I think it was called KirupaVille—you may find it. This was before Google Maps was a thing. You could scroll across a massive canvas where everyone created a plot with a house or building inside it. These were some of the fun things from the pixel-art days that always stood out to me. Every now and then, I wake up wondering what happened to that website. I rediscovered it maybe a month or so ago after deciding that I needed to find it. I had no recollection of it except for something like “pixel apartments,” and I couldn't find it anywhere. It took a lot of random searching over a couple of days to land on it again because, as you can tell, it isn't SEO-friendly. Everything is an image. There is no text you can select and click. I wanted to search for myself, but I can't for exactly that reason. I'm definitely there, though. There should be at least two floors. I remember them being there, and I'm pretty sure they weren't removed because the site hasn't been maintained or updated in all this time. I love this because it's almost a snapshot of a period that people have probably forgotten existed. I love watching archaeological dig-site documentaries on TV. Most of the time, the place is completely lost and has to be recreated. This, however, is a perfect representation of an old city that people never knew existed. What a time capsule. I also noticed the links on the right-hand side when we went to his homepage. Back then, you linked to your favorite inspirational sites and similar things, such as Where Is Departure? Many of those websites were represented there. If you scroll up a little, you can see the grid of icons on the right. There is eBoy, of course, but I also remember PixelFreak as a classic site from back in the day, and I think miomi was there as well. Those are little things I remember from an era when pixel art was all over the place. I love that these sites are still live. With PixelFreak, you might wonder why the site is all the way over on the left. Back then, that would have occupied about 50% of the screen on a 640-by-480 monitor. This is one of those things that makes no sense to people today, but if you lived through it, you recognize why it was done that way. Even the gradient in the background reflects the time. It isn't exactly a smooth gradient. It was deliberately made with fewer colors to create the dithering effect highlighted a moment ago. You can also see the challenge with the font because it's nearly illegible on the left-hand side. Back then, it would have appeared at a reasonable size on most monitors. Now, all of us use at least 1920-by-1080 displays, if not something much larger. Fonts had to evolve to look better, which is where Departure Mono and the more modern pixel fonts really shine. This is probably a better simulation of how the page would have looked, although it probably would have filled most of the screen. I also need to go on LinkedIn and see what this person is doing now. I periodically contact people and say, “Hey, I loved your work from 20 years ago,” and we always end up having fun conversations about it. The eBoy posters are great because they're still relevant. I've seen several companies—Google, at least, has done this a few times—hire them for an event in a particular city. They create a pixel montage of whichever city is hosting the event, and those have always been big hits. People love them, especially developer audiences, because they recognize the value of the pixel-art style. It is largely nostalgic, but it resonates with them. I've seen the eBoy posters featured at many conferences for that reason. ### [54:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3294s) - Helena Zhang Oh, yeah, that's cool. These are some modern interpretations of the particular style we were just looking at. Today, you can see artists working in many different kinds of pixel art, and some of the work is really cool. ### [55:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3313s) - Kirupa Yeah, very much. So you know, let's see, I've been, I've been poking around, but yeah, some some really beautiful stuff out there. Wow, this is fantastic because I think the one of the big changes I've seen in kind of the pixel art is that back then the pixel art was a combination of two things. It was part of, like the isometric art style where everything's on a 30, 60, 90 kind of an angle, and that also happened to be represented in pixel art form. But what we've seen since then I think it's a decoupling of those things. You can have pixel art but you don't have to have the isometric grid as a part of it. And some of the examples you had of some of the games, for example, they're on the 306090 grid to kind of take you back the nostalgic feel of it, but the art style isn't necessarly pixel art. So you have this combination now where you see both of it, but it still does a nice job capturing what it was back in the day for what would be considered modern pixel art. Yeah, but how about hotels classic? They still follow 306090 pattern for how they represent all the lines and they're also pixelart style. So I think they're probably one of the few remaining ones that are actively investing in that kind of space. Even EB boy, they use vectors for a lot of their visuals. I think, yeah, I see. ### [56:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3396s) - Helena Zhang You're seeing many of these higher-definition pieces now. This is all pixels. How incredible is that? There is a lot of fun work out there, including good animation work that combines After Effects with pixel art. I was trying to remember the designer's name. I think he goes by the initials DK, and I believe he's a Korean designer. He recently had a well-attended show in New York and also creates various installations. Let me see whether I can find a link. People are creating a lot of playful material, and the animation work is especially interesting to see. I know we're geeking out about this, but it's really fun. His name is DeeKay, spelled D-E-E-K-A-Y. A lot of his work combines pixel art and animation. I see him on LinkedIn all the time, and he posts on Instagram too. Pieces like these are fantastically done. ### [57:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3457s) - Kirupa Wow, that's so fun. Every frame contains some nostalgia. You saw Mega Man and the caterpillars—not the worms—from Super Mario World, but they were rendered in vector form. That's one of the benefits we have today. We can still achieve the pixel effect and use a pixel font, but modern technology and screens let us use those elements at different sizes. Given a high-resolution screen, you have more flexibility with the font and don't have to use it at exactly the pixel size for which it was created. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, especially with early computer graphics and movie interfaces, there was no alternative. That was the only option. Today, we have the luxury of choosing among art styles that have been popular over the decades and optimizing for what we want to do. Early movie interfaces highlighted this constraint clearly: the look wasn't a nostalgic choice, but a consequence of the limited options available. That's the most exciting part. Even DeeKay's work combines techniques and styles from many eras very nicely. Why not take the best of what works and use the right thing at the right moment? This is really fun. So, what's next for you? You have the fantastic icon library, and you mentioned wanting to keep expanding the character set in Departure Mono. What are you thinking about doing next? We can choose a style for its purpose now instead of using it because the hardware forces us to. ### [59:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3559s) - Helena Zhang Yeah, currently I'm working on Cyrillic for Departure Mono. I've also been thinking about learning more about variable fonts and expanding things in that direction. I don't even know how much sense it makes for a pixel font to be variable, but as we were just saying, there is technology we can use and there are ways to blend styles and techniques. ### [59:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3581s) - Kirupa So selfishly I want to say there's a huge place for that, because readability becomes really important once you have large blocks of text. Even on my own blog, all of my heading fonts are pixel fonts, and I experimented a lot with whether a pixel font could work for large bodies of text. I was never totally thrilled with the monospace version, so I do think there is a world where this could be applicable. ### [1:00:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3612s) - Helena Zhang Yeah, potentially. I would have to figure out a way to make, say, a bolder weight or a wider axis, or maybe something like a glitch axis where you can dial up how glitchy it gets. So maybe I'll play around with that. But I'm definitely continuing with Phosphor, and honestly this conversation has inspired me to get into pixel art more directly too and see what my own blend of it might be. ### [1:01:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3660s) - Kirupa Yeah, pixel art really is timeless. I think nostalgia is part of it for me, but clearly the style still resonates with a large audience even today, given how much we still see it in pop culture. ### [1:01:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3676s) - Helena Zhang Yeah, it's not going away anytime soon. I hope not, anyway. Even if it does fade a little, there will always be some of us dragging the corpse of the art style forward as much as we can. There's always going to be someone listening to vinyl records, right? And hopefully the overlap keeps growing in the future. ### [1:01:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3698s) - Kirupa Is there anything else that you feel we should highlight or talk about in terms of what you've created—anything in your mood board that we didn't fully cover? ### [1:01:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3709s) - Helena Zhang Let's see. I think we did a pretty good job bouncing around, and of course there's so much more to talk about, but we can continue the conversation another time. What I really want to drive home with this mind map is how much research goes into something like this, and how fun it is to go down all these rabbit holes. If you're embarking on your next creative project, find something you're genuinely interested in and really obsess over it. Something good will come out of that. ### [1:02:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3746s) - Kirupa Fantastic. And you know what I absolutely loved about our conversation? We never mentioned artificial intelligence even once, which I think is kind of amazing. ### [1:02:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3756s) - Helena Zhang Well, now we did. ### [1:02:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3756s) - Kirupa Oh, now we did, exactly. But only to mention that we hadn't mentioned it. I love that. This all feels like the antithesis of artificial intelligence, right? It's about manually placing pixels one by one. ### [1:02:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3772s) - Helena Zhang Yeah, there's something nice about seeing that happen. ### [1:02:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3774s) - Kirupa So, well, Helena, it was great chatting with you. I love the font, love the icons, and I can't wait to see all the other cool things you're doing. We'll definitely chat more about other topics in the near future. ### [1:03:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5CJxYnpEE&t=3789s) - Helena Zhang Yeah, thanks so much for having me. [Browse all Interviews with Creative People](https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm).