Bitcount Prop Double

Petr van Blokland started Bitcount from a small sum. An a and an e need at least 5 pixels of x-height to be readable, and with a row each for ascenders and descenders the smallest grid that holds a whole alphabet comes to 5 pixels wide by 7 high. Everything in the Bitcount family is a variation on those 35-odd dots: round or square pixels, big or small ones, slanted or upright, condensed or not, and 1-pixel or 2-pixel stems.

This member is the Prop Double. Double means the stems are 2 pixels thick. Prop means each letter gets the width it needs, rounded to whole pixels, where the Grid and Mono cousins put every letter on a fixed 6-pixel width and patch the narrow i and l with serifs to fill it. Since the widths vary, Prop is also the only variant that can be kerned, and it is.

Each pixel is 100 units of a 1,000-unit em, so 1 pixel is a tenth of the font size. That makes the spacing easy to reason about: in InDesign every extra pixel between letters is a tracking value of 10.

Van Blokland’s own suggestions for it run from running LED signs and cheap low-resolution screens to stacking several copies in different colors, each copy shifted a little, for shadows and fake 3D. He also mentions building letters out of LEGO bricks or lit office windows. We would take the stacking idea first; it is where a 9-weight pixel face earns its keep, and the small caps, old style figures and 6 stylistic sets give each layer something different to do.