Bitcount
Designed By
Petr van Blokland
9 Styles Display
The evening
edition.
Bitcount · 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 ↓TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
Next train in 4 minutes
A Headline In Place
Bitcount · 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
Next train in 4 minutes
Extra Light200
Next train in 4 minutes
Light300
Next train in 4 minutes
Regular400
Next train in 4 minutes
Medium500
Next train in 4 minutes
Semi Bold600
Next train in 4 minutes
Bold700
Next train in 4 minutes
Extra Bold800
Next train in 4 minutes
Black900
Next train in 4 minutes
5 pixels is the least you need to draw an a and an e, by Petr van Blokland’s count, so that is Bitcount’s x-height. Add 1 pixel above for ascenders and 1 below for descenders and you have the whole grid, 5 wide and 7 high, 35 pixels to make every letter from.
From that tiny grid TYPETR gets a startling number of variations. Stems can be 1 pixel or 2, letters roman or slanted, normal or condensed, and the pixels themselves can be big or small circles or squares. Most letters within a variant share the same spacing, which is the clever bit: stack 2 or 3 layers in different colors, shift 1 slightly, and you get shadows and highlights that pass for 3D.
Van Blokland lists other uses from practice. Running LED displays, where the italic imitates the slanted lag of the electronics. Low resolution screens and printers. Even physical lettering, with LEGO bricks or the lit windows of a building as the pixels.
Measuring is easy, since a pixel is 1/10 of the font size; in InDesign a tracking value of 10 adds exactly 1 pixel of space. This family comes in 9 weights, Thin to Black, with small caps, a slashed zero and 6 stylistic sets.

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
9 TTF styles with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 201 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/bitcount.css">
body {
font-family: 'Bitcount', sans-serif;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.
Heading & Body
The family provides the heading; Inter carries the supporting text.
Bitcount 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.
