Tiny5

Browse all glyphs and try the variable axes →

Tiny5 is a family of compact 5-pixel variable fonts that capture the essence of 1980s–90s digital minimalism. Inspired by the graphing calculators and pocket gadgets of the era, they distill letterforms to their absolute essentials—proving that even at just five pixels tall, clarity, charm, and personality can thrive together.

The family has three members, sharing the same letterforms, variable axes and language support:

• Tiny5 draws every stroke one pixel wide—the text face of the family, at home in body copy and dense readouts.
• Tiny5 Duo doubles the vertical stems, giving the same letterforms a sturdier, more emphatic presence—ideal for headlines, labels and anywhere a little extra weight helps the text hold its own.
• Tiny5 Mono sets the same letterforms in a fixed cell for code editors, terminals and text-mode interfaces—its box-drawing and block characters fill the whole cell.

Used together, they give you a light, a heavy and a monospaced voice that stay true to the pixel-perfect aesthetic.

All three fonts feature six variable axes — Weight, Width, Italic, Roundness, Bleed and Jitter — giving you precise control over their look: from crisp geometric shapes and sharp LCD edges to the soft glow of CRT monitors and the subtle ink spread of dot-matrix printers.

The family excels at evoking retro-futurism, constrained-tech nostalgia, and clean minimalism. It's especially well-suited for:

• Pixel art and lo-fi games, with Tiny5 Duo for titles, headings and HUDs
• Terminal-style interfaces and embedded systems
• Micro-typography in UI/UX design
• Branding with a distinct 8/16-bit or vintage electronics vibe

The family provides broad language support, covering Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Armenian scripts across 974 languages. Tiny5 goes well beyond them with IPA, mathematical operators, arrows, geometric shapes, dingbats, Braille, block elements and the sextants and much of Symbols for Legacy Computing, for a total of 4,094 glyphs. It also has small caps for Latin and Cyrillic.

For pixel-perfect results, set the font size to increments of 6 pt (8 px).

All three fonts are also available in BDF format for seamless integration with the mcu-renderer, u8g2 and TFT_eSPI libraries.

Projects using Tiny5

• Momentum firmware - Custom firmware for Flipper
• Besprited – A pixel sprite editor
• DRAW - Pixel art editor
• FoxHole Guard - Privacy-focused Android networking app with VPN, Tor, I2P, firewall, DNS filtering, traffic routing, and FoxHole Sentinel
• DwarfAI-Miners - Local desktop panel that turns your AI coding sessions into an isometric dwarf mining colony - watch, message, and manage your agents in real time
• Estlcam - CAM and CNC software (Video)

About

Stefan Schmidt is an electrical engineer with graduate studies in signal processing, multimodal artistic languages and sociology. Fascinated by the interplay between the virtual and the real, his work probes the boundaries between perception and technology.

Learn more at http://www.stefanschmidtart.com.

Building

Fonts are built automatically by GitHub Actions — take a look in the "Actions" tab for the latest build.

If you want to build fonts manually on your own computer:

• make build will produce font files.
• make test will run Fontspector's quality assurance tests.
• make proof will generate HTML proof files.

Acknowledgements

• Thanks to type.today for reviewing Tiny5 and offering invaluable criticism.
• Thanks to the Google Fonts team for their superb support.
• Thanks to Fontesk and 1001 Fonts for their friendly support.

Changelog

3.001

• Added CRT, LCD and Matrix bold, italic and bold+italic static fonts.
• Removed U+00AD glyph.
• Decreased bold weight.

3.000

• Character set more than doubled, from 1,942 to 4,094 glyphs, now following Tiny5 Mono: Greek and Coptic letters, Phonetic Extensions small capitals, spaces and general punctuation, Roman numerals and fractions, arrows, mathematical operators, technical symbols, control pictures, OCR, enclosed alphanumerics, block elements, geometric shapes, dingbats, miscellaneous symbols and arrows, sextants and Symbols for Legacy Computing.
• Added small caps for Latin and Cyrillic, with accented small caps built from the capitals (smcp and c2sc).
• Covers more than half of the Google Fonts Symbols character set.
• Added Braille patterns, soft hyphen, IPA small capitals, modifier letters, IPA stress and length marks, and combining turned comma, stroke overlays and tone marks.
• Taller parentheses, brackets, braces, vertical line, broken bar and section sign; lowered low line and spacing ogonek; raised tilde and spacing accents.
• Wider latin uppercase j.
• Redesigned: digit three, at sign, yen, copyright and registered signs, vulgar fractions, latin uppercase c, q, v, eth, d with stroke, h with stroke, o with stroke and eng, latin lowercase eth, d with stroke, g with stroke, h with stroke, o with stroke, t with stroke, z with stroke, l with bar, l with middle tilde, gamma, r with fishhook, upsilon and bilabial click.
• Greek smooth and rough breathings are now told apart, and capital letters carry their breathings and accents in front of the letter.
• The horn of latin uppercase and lowercase o with horn, and of their tone forms, now sits on the top row of the letter.
• Raised the stems of cyrillic ђ, ћ, Ѣ, ѣ, Ҍ, ҍ, Ҟ and ҟ.
• Rings above and below now touch the letter.
• Bars now cross the stems of barred letters, and hooks no longer merge with the letter or stick out to the left.
• Breves and inverted breves no longer look like carons and circumflexes.
• Comma accents and curly quotes are now shaped like commas.
• Fixed modifier letter vertical line.

2.007

• Fixed combining marks
• Fixed duplicate overlapping pixels in composed glyphs.
• Fixed the OS/2 WWS bit in the font metadata.

2.006

• Added missing characters.

2.005

• Replaced axis Slant with Italic.
• Fixed font names of the Italic and Medium styles.

2.004

• Improved how pixel elements respond to the variable axes.
• Added Armenian language support.

2.003

• Renamed bold weight to Tiny5 Duo variant.
• Added axes: Width, Slant and Jitter.
• Renamed axes: Element Size → Weight.
• Fixes: latin uppercase l, latin uppercase q, latin uppercase v, latin uppercase x, latin uppercase y, latin uppercase z, latin lowercase x, comma, semicolon, double angle quotation marks, double acute, double grave, latin small sharp s, greek capital delta, greek capital xi, greek lowercase epsilon, greek lowercase phi, greek lowercase psi, greek descenders, cyrillic capital ghe, various diacritics.

2.002

• Fixes: percent sign, latin lowercase j, various cyrillic glyphs, various hooks and descenders.

2.001

• Minor fixes.

2.000

• Added variable font support with axes for: Element Size, Roundness and Bleed.
• Added bold weight.
• Added Vietnamese language support (Google Fonts Latin Vietnamese character set).
• Added Google Fonts Latin Beyond, Latin PriAfrican, Greek Plus and Greek Pro character sets.
• Improved build workflow with bdf2ufo.
• Major corrections to the greek and cyrillic character sets.
• Updated presentation image and samples.

1.002

• Added Google Fonts Greek Core, Cyrillic Core and Cyrillic Plus character sets.

1.001

• Added Google Fonts Latin Plus and Latin African character sets.
• Major corrections.

1.000

• First release.

License

This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. This license is available with a FAQ at https://openfontlicense.org