Bitcount Grid Single
Designed By
Petr van Blokland
9 Styles Display
The evening
edition.
Bitcount Grid Single · Regular
Try a short headline and compare the letterforms at a larger scale.
9 styles available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.
Download Bitcount Grid Single ↓TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
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A Headline In Place
Bitcount Grid Single · Regular
A poster setting with supporting text.
Theatre / Music / Conversation
An Evening
In Good
Company.
Friday · 7:30 pm
The Assembly Rooms
9 Styles,
One Family
Every available style is shown below in its own font file.
Thin100
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Extra Light200
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Light300
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Regular400
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Medium500
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Semi Bold600
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Bold700
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Extra Bold800
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Black900
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How few pixels does a letter need? Petr van Blokland’s answer is that a and e cannot be drawn in fewer than 5 vertical pixels, and with 1 more on top for ascenders and 1 below for descenders, the whole alphabet fits a grid 5 pixels wide and 7 high. Bitcount sits on that grid. The big family he built at TYPETR comes from varying everything else: the shape of the pixel, stems of 1 or 2 pixels, upright or slanted, how the accents are drawn.
Grid Single is the monospaced cut with 1 pixel stems. Every character takes 6 pixels of width, and the letters that would rattle around in that much room, i and l for instance, get serifs to fill it, even though the design underneath is a sans. Van Blokland treats weight as a matter of how big each pixel is, with the count left alone, and the 9 styles here go from Thin to Black.
The arithmetic is friendly. Each pixel is 100 units of a 1000 unit em, so a pixel is a tenth of the font size, and 1 extra pixel of letterspacing in InDesign is a tracking value of 10.
Because the letters share their spacing, you can stack copies in different weights and colors and nudge one slightly off center to fake a shadow or a highlight, which is the use the designer seems fondest of. His manual also points at running LED displays, low resolution screens and physical work, LEGO bricks or the lit windows of a building. There are small caps, old style figures, a slashed zero and 5 stylistic sets on top.
We would keep the Thin for those layered tricks. Alone, at text size, it reads as a scatter of specks.
Characters & Figures
396 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 393 recorded characters.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ ? !
View The Recorded Character Selection
The Font Files
Download
Bitcount Grid Single
9 TTF styles with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 191 KB ↓- Version
- 1.0
- License
- SIL Open Font License 1.1
Install On Your Computer
Extract the ZIP first. On Windows, select the font files and choose Install from the context menu. On macOS, open the files in Font Book and choose Install.
Use On A Website
Keep the font files and the included stylesheet together. Update the stylesheet path to match your project.
<link rel="stylesheet"
href="/fonts/bitcount-grid-single/bitcount-grid-single.css">
body {
font-family: 'Bitcount Grid Single', sans-serif;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.
Heading & Body
The family provides the heading; Inter carries the supporting text.
Bitcount Grid Single Heading · Inter Body
The Evening Performance
Doors open at seven. The performance begins at half past. Please take your seat before the lights go down.