Tiny5

Try Tiny5

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Tiny5 Regular

About Tiny5

Tiny5 is a display typeface drawn on a pixel grid in which a capital letter is five pixels high. Widths are proportional: an i takes a single column while m and w spread over several, and curves are reduced to steps and missing corners. Stefan Schmidt designed it around the idea of using as little information as possible while keeping text legible, with the displays of graphing calculators and other digital gadgets from the 1980s and 1990s as a reference. The official notes suggest it for a retro mood, for conveying minimalism and for small displays. The family has one Regular style and is not a variable font. Its 1,155 glyphs cover Latin, Latin Extended, Cyrillic and Greek. Tiny5 is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Tiny5 works

Retro game and gadget graphics

Five-pixel letters reproduce the look of calculator and handheld screens from the 1980s and 1990s.

Titles in pixel-art projects

Because every stroke sits on a grid, Tiny5 lines up with pixel-art illustrations when scaled by whole multiples.

Readouts on small displays

The official notes mention small displays, where a five-pixel alphabet fits many characters into few rows.

Pixel titles in Russian or Greek

Cyrillic and Greek alphabets are drawn on the same five-pixel grid, so a title can switch script without changing face.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Turkish
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Romanian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Estonian
• Russian
• Ukrainian
• Bulgarian
• Greek

Writing systems with glyphs in the family besides Latin: Cyrillic, Greek. These are listed as scripts, not as a promise for every language written in them.

Character sets found in the files: cyrillic, cyrillic-ext, greek, latin, latin-ext. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with Tiny5

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use Tiny5 on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Tiny5";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Tiny5-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Tiny5", sans-serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Tiny5 with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Tiny5&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Proportional, not monospaced

Letters have different widths. Tiny5 will not align in columns the way a fixed-width pixel font does.

One style

Tiny5 has a single Regular style and is not a variable font; the phrase variable-width in the official notes refers to letter widths.

Scale in whole steps

The outlines are square pixels, so sizes that are multiples of the grid keep the edges sharp on screen.

FAQs

Collections with Tiny5

• Pixel and arcade fonts

  Bitmap-style and dot-matrix display fonts after 1980s game screens, terminals and LED panels, for retro games and tech graphics.

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All display fonts