toki pona: drawing a hundred and forty-five symbols

[packbat]

A little belated an announcement, but check this out - we drew a set of toki pona hieroglyphs!

The thing about emoji is that they have to be legible under some fairly severe conditions. They are generally displayed around the size of the surrounding text - 12-point type is only 16 pixels high, and indeed we found that emoji in display names were shown at that size on Mastodon instances - and they are displayed as-is against whatever background is present, light or dark. A lot of emoji styles kind of ignore this, but given that these emoji are acting as full-on language, legibility is pretty important.

So we started drawing our own.

And then we started learning.

1. Most sitelen pona fonts are based on the earliest popular sitelen pona fonts ... but if you reference the 2014 book by the creator of the language, these fonts change the vibes of a lot of characters. And we like jan Sonja's characters.
2. The nimi ku suli wordlist from 2021 is an important record of the state of the language in 2021, but ... like, it's not The Official Word List. Trends change - most dramatically with kokosila, which went from 54% in 2021 polls to 25% in 2022 polls - and also the language belongs to the speakers, not a list. We're allowed to decide for ourselves which words we consider important.
3. paint.NET's magic-wand selections have no anti-aliasing, and simply blurring won't do - we need to draw emojis oversize and scale down to make the outlines right.
4. For clarity, certain symbols, like soko, should be drawn specific ways that make them separate from others (mama, in that case).
5. For clarity, outlines should be solid, not gradient - and wide solid outlines are good.
6. ilo Linku cannot use fonts released under Hippocratic License variants, but people would still be interested in such a font.
7. Auto-generating outline fonts from 128px square images is dubious.

That all said, this process has made us very fast and comfortable drawing new glyphs - with all the redrawing we needed, we ended up well over 240 images drawn, quite probably over 300. Also, our core concept worked: draw with pixel art a 16x16 version of the symbol, then blow it up and redraw it with smooth cubic-bezier lines.

We really should have used a vector art program, however.

However, the results are really good. We're super proud.