



Minima has an extremely small design size of 4px, with a CAP-height of 3px (capital letters) and an x-height of 2px (lowercase letters without ascenders or descenders). It's very likely the smallest comprehensive set of characters based on appearance. With Minima, you could save Romeo and Juliet on a regular sheet of paper with a regular printer.

Many other applications need no reading-glasses because Minima scales perfectly to each multiple of its 4px base size. It can be used in coding environments with its quick scaling to miniature sizes, in signal text visible from afar, creatively edited in exciting designs or just plain black on white in normal text.

It's designed for the common .ttf file format and ready for all regular font uses, though these are certainly not its limits.

Despite the glory of pixels, you may entertain the thought of replacing pixels with something else. Think about all kinds of displays, about rocks in the sand, toy bricks, real bricks and tiles, people in a choreography, or raised dots. This is your solution.

the Typeface: it's a system

T-Shirts: MINIMA, Nightglow, Smileface

12 visual treats: the Calendar

Minima is an intricate but intuitive writing system that uses very few pixels or dots to represent characters. It can be represented in specifications highly similar to those of Braille. Unabbreviated text in Minima would take about the same size as grade-1 Braille but it comes with several advantages:

Minima follows the acclaimed Unicode standard that unifies international alphabets and character sets unambigously, so that one character will never refer to an entirely different character in another language. Minima has uppercase letters and numbers as distinct individual entities, and an expansive repertoire of supplemental symbols.

Characters in Minima have varying widths. They can consist of just one column of raised dots, two columns, three or more. This so-called proportional width also means that spaces between characters are not fixed but flexible; once a character is finished, an unraised dot follows. Through this approach, Minima can feature a much larger overall number of characters, and their design can be matched to follow a number of targets: that they are most easily recognized on their own, that they are obviously distinct from one another, and that they flow together nicely, with similarities in weight and in an immediate order.

Another advantage comes from the metric alignment of characters along imaginary bounding lines. Lowercase letters are even more pointedly based within two central rows. A few of them also occupy dots above, a few occupy dots below, but all of them have major raised dot parts in the central rows. This way, the vertical arrangement of dots is tighter as well, making the lines easier to follow.

If you miss the visual alphabet, there is little learning needed to pick up Minima. If you don't know the visual alphabet yet, you can get a good grasp with it.

Minima should be relatively easy to implement in future equipment for producing and reading tactile writing. Please note however that this project is not about any such device or implementation. Any such plans could not be made before this project's goal is secured: to complete and establish Minima as a system.

a quick sketch of how cool a Minima tactile pad could look

compactness comparison: Minima, Braille, Morse, raw UTF-8 data

To build a sophisticated typeface takes serious time and effort. I have accomplished a lot already but it is going to take longer than I can sustain myself. This is why I ask you for support, it's the only way I can make Minima perfect.

On Kickstarter, you can not only donate to support Minima, you can also choose rewards for your pledges. The Typeface is the heart of everything, and it is also included with any other reward. You will get the first release for supporters in December, and you'll be granted access to all future version updates.

Soon, you can print and process Minima yourself. In addition to that, you can get some great products right away. Both the hand-stencilled T-Shirts and professionally printed large Calendars will provide you with several things at once: a nicely designed product at a reasonable price, a clever display of what Minima does, fun with language and pixel graphics, and the good feeling that you were a part of making this possible.

An important detail: All purchases will only become effective if the total funding sum for Minima is reached. This funding sum is 80,000 €. While this is moderate on a business scale, it is not a small sum to me, and I take great care that I will meet all responsibilities.

More than 25,000 € will likely go into the production and shipping of your physical items. Shipping takes a large part because all shippping costs are included within the prices. Minima is made to be international, and this will help. It's also smart long-term advertisement.

About 35,000 € is the core budget for the development of a final version which might take another year. I need much of this plainly to make a living while I work on Minima full-time. I will also buy new hardware and software to help me develop, test and present Minima, and use this money for any other expenses. Such might be a planned website update, legal help, any office type and enterprise maintenance cost, or commissioned creative contributions. The list is non-exhaustive.

Up to 20,000 € will go into value-added tax and provisions, depending on some different factors (no such tax applies to exports outside of the EU – I'd like to apologize for the misphrasing in the rewards).





As indicated above, an early version exists and will be available to supporters soon. It is a dedicated beta release that is mostly restricted to Unicode characters 0020 to 00FF (ASCII and Latin-1 Supplement) but these have been carefully finetuned to be very close to their final states.

Underneath its pixel surface, Minima is a very modern typeface in OpenType/TrueType vector specifications. It supports many typographic features, from the usual to the advanced. Its meticulous kerning (the alignment corrections of specific character pairs) should be supported nearly everywhere, as should ligatures like connected letters 'ﬁ'. In more professional surroundings, contextual substitutions make Minima even nicer and slimmer by replacing some characters with modified versions of themselves for a better fit. All of that is already implemented in the finished 0.2 release, including the alternate glyphs for substitution.

The final version is going to have many, many more characters. It will cover dozens of languages in Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Hebrew scripts, possibly more. Also the complete Unicode punctuation block, lots of geometric shapes, mathematical operators, all sorts of symbols and icons, smileys and even funny animals.

I'm René Finken, 31, and I live in Aachen, Germany, where I have studied linguistics and philosophy at the technical university. After a few years that I spent with techno and journalism, my old love for type and code has caught up with me again.

Since I learnt to write, I've been fascinated with how there are different possibilities to write, how different even single letters can be realised without losing their meaning. I care greatly about all aspects of typography, and I've gotten to know it from many angles. Minima has finally made me delve deeply into the actual craft of making typefaces, understand the specifications and solve many sidequests in order to make it work. After sketching typefaces and contemplating their aesthetics all my life, I knew I couldn't forgive myself if I hadn't.

By now, I dare say that I know my way around. Minima is the typeface that I wanted before I even had the idea to make it, and Minima is exactly what I'm great at. I hope that I may continue to work on it.

If you want to provide news about, or just share, the Minima campaign, I have compiled some useful graphics on the official website minimatype.com. You can scale them nicely to practically any size, just be sure to disable interpolation. For more facts, updates and fun, follow Minima on facebook.com/minimatype or twitter.com/minimatype.

Anything else? I can be contacted! My email is info@minimatype.com.