In my experience, bilingual typefaces can often be hard to find and very limited in applicability. Game Over is a response to the lack of available typefaces for designers to work with. Not only does creating this typeface allow me to increase diversity of bilingual English-Hebrew font choices, but it also allows to me find intersections between two very different cultural phenomena.

Since Hebrew is a recently revived language, many Hebrew fonts today pull inspiration from main artifacts of Jewish culture such as religious texts. Game Over pulls inspiration from biblical letterforms which can be characterized by accentuated “serifs” and thick, high-contrast horizontal strokes.

I sketched multiple variations of each letter within in 8x8 grids on graph paper. Especially for the Hebrew characters, it was difficult to force fluid character types to be legible with limited space. Hebrew characters with final forms that usually extend past the “descender” (כ,מ,נ,פ,צ), were designed thinner to appear longer than other letters in order to compensate for lack of vertical space.

Game Over is a rigid typeface for playful applications. Though Game Over is designed to be scalable for digital platforms, it fits well for use in print and other contexts. For the final letterset, I created many of the special characters found on keyboard as well. I applied the typeface to a Mario landscape to demonstrate ease of integration into gameplay.