About the Book

Arcade Game Typography presents readers with a fascinating new world of typography – the pixel typeface. Video game designers of the 70s, 80s and 90s faced colour and resolution limitations that stimulated incredible creativity: with letters having to exist in an 8×8 square grid, artists found ways to create expressive and elegant character sets within a tiny canvas.

Featuring pixel typefaces carefully selected from the first decades of arcade video games, Arcade Game Typography presents a previously undocumented ‘outsider typography’ movement, accompanied by insightful commentary from author Toshi Omagari, a Monotype typeface designer himself, and screenshots of the type in use. Exhaustively researched, this book gathers an eclectic typography from hit games such as Super Sprint, Pac-Man, After Burner, Marble Madness, Shinobi, as well as countless lesser- known gems. The book presents its typefaces on a dynamic and decorative grid, taking reference from high-end type specimens while adding a suitably playful twist. Unlike print typefaces, pixel type often has bold colour ‘baked in’ to the characters, so Arcade Game Typography looks unlike any other typography book, fizzing with life and colour.

About the Author

Toshi Omagari is a typeface designer at Monotype UK. He studied typography and typeface design at Musashino Art University in Tokyo. Arcade Game Typography is his first book.

Kiyonori Muroga is the former editor-in-chief of the renowned Japanese design magazine IDEA. He now works as an editor, writer and curator on graphic design and typography.

MEET THE PUBLISHER

Name: Arcade Game Typography
Brand: Thames &amp; Hudson
SKU: 18975
Availability: OutOfStock

Thames & Hudson

Thames & Hudson was founded in 1949 by Walter and Eva Neurath. Their passion and mission was to create a ‘museum without walls’ and to make accessible to a large reading public the world of art and the research of top scholars. To reflect its international outlook the name for the company linked the rivers flowing through London and New York, represented in its logo by two dolphins symbolizing friendship and intelligence, one facing east, one west, suggesting a transatlantic connection.

Today, still an independent, family-owned company, Thames & Hudson is one of the world’s leading publishers of illustrated books with over 2,000 titles in print. We publish high-quality books across ‎all areas of visual creativity: the arts (fine, applied, decorative, performing), architecture, design, photography, fashion, film and music, and also archaeology, history and popular culture. Our children’s books list is also expanding. Headquartered in London, we have a sister company in New York and subsidiary sales and distribution companies in Hong Kong and Paris. Today the group employs 150 staff in London and a further 65 around the world.

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