Elvira Golubova

SB Genie is a geometrically constructed display typeface inspired by Op Art. During the 1970s, graphic designers started to experiment with graphics and lettering inspired by Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely, Franco Grignani and other artists working in the field of optical art. The high-contrast striping creates a strong visual effect that is further enhanced by the precise circular curving and horizontal flow of the letterforms. SB Genie is designed a display typeface and is best used at larger sizes where visual impact is required. It works well in simple, high-contrast colours and in black and white.

SB Vibe takes its inspiration from a number of places. It is mainly inspired by 1980s and 1990s car typography as well as the stencilled logo and typeface of the guitar pedal and musical instrument manufacturer Boss, but also has some influence from Aldo Novarese’s Stop and Donald J. Handel’s Handel Gothic typefaces. SB Vibe is a geometric, monoline sans-serif typeface with some stencil-like elements, featuring short ascenders and a large x-height. Its primary use is as a display typeface or for use in logos and its linear, rectangular, curved letterforms suggest speed and efficiency. This makes it well suited to sports, automotive, audio and technology themed projects and it would work well in a motorsports, drone or robotics project. When SB Vibe was released it consistent of only two weights, but has now been expanded into a family of 50 fonts, comprising of 25 fonts in five weights and five widths, with corresponding slanted obliques. An extended glyph count of more than 480 glyphs expands the range of languages supported and OpenType features including stylistic and contextual alternatives, case sensitive brackets, tabular figures and long and short ascenders along with eight Stylistic Sets enable a vast range of tonal and creative expression.

SB Websnap is a pixel font designed to be legible at very small sizes. Although SB Liquid and SB Message both found uses online, SB Websnap was the first SelfBuild Type Foundry typeface designed specifically for screen. It was designed primarily for small text, such as copyright and photo credits, legal disclaimers, or on banner adverts where space is limited. The grid used for the design is the minimum possible for a pixel font with good legibility, with a capital height of just five pixels. The typeface is optimised for use at 10px. The first version of this typeface was a capital-only font, but lower case letters and additional glyphs were later added. SB Websnap was designed for use in pixel graphics and as a Flash compatible pixelfont, both of which were popular as designers experimented with ways to improve the way the web looked and functioned. Later, a rounded version of the original pixelfont was added, opening up it to use as a headline typeface for today’s high-DPI screens.

SB Thorax is a futuristic, angular typeface with strange, blackletter influenced letterforms. It is based on a triangular grid and has a distinctly alien, insectoid flavour that makes it well suited to science fiction, gaming and technology themed projects. This capitals-only typeface consists of three styles which are designed to be combined and layered with one another. Overlaying the base font with other versions of the font allows the designer to create letterforms with different coloured sections or different transparencies. SB Thorax can be categorised as a decorative display typeface and its unusual, detailed and often difficult to read letterforms mean it is best suited for poster headlines and other uses where a distinctive style is preferred in order to create maximum visual impact.

SB Sonar is a heavy, wide, rectangular typeface with sharp, angular features. It has a futuristic edge and works nicely as an alternative to Eurostile, perhaps for a gaming or sports themed project. While it takes its inspiration from the high-tech graphic language of science fiction films, it still retains some retro appeal and could easily have been taken from VHS tape packaging from the 1980s. SB Sonar is designed primarily as an impactful headline typeface for use in magazines, posters and logos. Its modern, mechanical looks make it a good match for electronic or audio devices or projects that require a technological feel, perhaps with a slight retro-future twist.

SB Raster is a blocky, bold, rectangular typeface with square pixellated corner details reminiscent of early videogame graphics. This capitals-only typeface started life as an extended pixelfont but as the design developed, it morphed into something with a more retro-digital arcade feel. The resulting typeface is well suited to anything related to retro computing, 8-bit consoles and game graphics. Its heavy, wide letterforms give it impact and it is best suited to display and headline use, perhaps on posters or as part of a logo. SB Raster has a strong retro flavour and works well at large sizes and in strong colours alongside similarly strong, geometric graphics.

SB Pixelpaint is the result of delving back into the early pre-history of computer-aided graphic design, a time of bitmap graphics, floppy disks and black and white monitors. SB Pixelpaint is a collection of pixellated dingbats, arrows and tile glyphs designed to be used as repeating pattern fills, taking inspiration from the earliest computer paint programs, such as MacPaint and MS Paint. These programs allowed users to select an area of the artwork to fill with a pre-defined pattern fill, and these programs often offered a range of patterns for the user to choose from: checkerboard, stripes, a tiled roof or even a brick wall effect perhaps? SB Pixelpaint includes some of these pixelated tiles so you can experience the joy of using these early paint programs, but with the added bonus of being able to overlay and combine them using colour and transparency. Many of the glyphs in this font are designed to be used as pattern fills by repeating the same character, but you can create any combination you like. SB Pixelpaint is optimised for use at 10px. You will also need to set the leading to 10px and make sure the tracking is set to zero. This font also features a range of pixel-friendly dingbats and arrows, so it is recommended to use your application’s glyph picker to view the full range of tiles and symbols.

SB Phormic is a grunge typeface with hybrid DNA, spliced together from two other typefaces. Its genesis was the interpolation of SB Tokyo and SB Liquid, creating something new, yet strangely reminiscent of them both. The resulting letterforms have a distressed mechanical look, perhaps like something you might find on the output from a fax machine or some other text generating machine. There are pixel like forms in there, but they appear broken and distorted, giving the impression of damaged electronics or corroded machinery. SB Phormic works well in these contexts, as a distressed typeface to convey the feeling invoked by seeing the decaying remnants of heavy industry or the technological scrapheaps of abandoned technology.

SB Navigator was designed for screen use, as a legible text typeface for use in website navigation menus. It was intended to be used as part of static pixel graphics or as part of a Flash animated menu, in the days when the web was a low-resolution experience, before webfonts became possible and when web designers were trying to find ways to push the internet forward from a design and usability point of view. SB Navigator also performs well as a text font, retaining good legibility at small sizes, thanks to lessons learned in the production of SB Liquid. It is optimised for use at 10px but can also work well at 20px. As a typeface it acts as a versatile alternative to the industry standard LCD font that SB Liquid is based on and would work well as part of an electronic display thanks to its clear letterforms. The family also features a rounded pixel version, opening it up for use as a headline typeface for high-DPI displays.

SB Modem’s curved, bubble-like aesthetic is infused with retro-futurism and evokes the space age dreams of what life might be like for humanity in the far future of the year 2000. Although SB Modem has its origins in the 1990s, it owes something to the designers and artists of the 1960s, who developed a visual style that embodied the optimistic hopes people had for the potential of technology to improve peoples’ lives. While it could be categorised as a rounded pixel font, the process that created it wasn’t the usual method. The first versions were created in an early version of Photoshop, with each letter being drawn pixel by pixel at a very low resolution. Then these letters were processed by repeatedly applying blur and increasing the contrast to bring the edges back into focus, before being completely redrawn in Fontographer. The final typeface was named after a device that was cutting edge technology at the time, but which is now also comfortably retro. However, SB Modem’s retro future curves still work nicely for communication and digitally themed projects, even if none of us are living on the moon, yet.

SB Message is a typeface inspired by the font used on the old Nokia cellphone displays. Although it later found use as a pixel font, during the early days of web design when designers were experimenting with pixel based graphics, it was originally designed for use in print. This was pre-smartphone era and Nokia phones were ubiquitous. Nokia featured the best design the mobile phone industry had to offer and it dominated the market in the years before Apple launched its game-changing iPhone. At this time, marketeers were taking their first tentative steps in attempting to engage consumers using the relatively new technologies of the web and SMS messaging and at that time few typefaces existed that were suited for these uses. SB Message takes its cues from the Nokia font, but critically it is taller and narrower, improving its impact as a display typeface for use in headlines. Initially only two styles were produced, Solid and Open, aimed at creating a screen-like headline, but later dot matrix, VDU line and rounded pixelfont versions were added, giving the designer more flexibility in using this typeface. SB Message still performs as a very legible pixelfont and is optimised for use at 10px height.

SB Liquid is a digitisation of the typeface used on many Liquid Crystal Display panels. It was originally referenced from the display of a Kawai K-1 synthesizer, a musical instrument that used one of these LCD strip displays to display information about the sound to the musician playing it. The original intention was to use it in instruction manuals for an early mobile phone company, during the era when mobile phones used standard digital displays and needed an instruction manual, but it was so common in the world of electronic musical instruments that it also fitted well for projects based around electronic music. Initially only two styles were produced, Open and Solid, aimed at allowing the designer to emulate the look of the original LCD screens, but it also found a use as text pixelfont during the early days of web graphics, thanks to the high legibility of the letterforms. Later, dot matrix and rounded pixelfont styles were added to give designers more options when using the typeface, with the rounded version being intended for display and headline use. To this day the original styles still have a secondary use in the electronics manufacturing world, where this kind of display is still in use, boosted by the emergence of cheap, accessible computing devices. SB Liquid also works as a legible pixelfont and is optimised for use at 10px.

SB Grip is a pixelfont from the revival of bitmapped lettering that occurred during the early 2000s, as designers grappled with ways to tackle the slow loading and low-resolution internet of the day. Many pixelfonts at the time were designed for more practical text use, but there were also display pixel fonts. SB Grip is one of this type of pixel font and was designed to be layered over imagery and photography, and so has a semi-transparent treatment, at least in bitmap terms. Compared with other pixel fonts, which are often optimised to be used at 10-12px, SB Grip is a large typeface, being designed to be used at a size of 40px and multiples of 40px. It works well layered over other elements and has a pattern-like quality due to its repeating segmented design. SB Grip takes its name from its similarity to the type of gripped flooring that also features a repeating pattern.