What is this? 

The other day, I stared at Bowie’s Blackstar album cover for a while before mentioning to my partner that the glyphs across the bottom looked like they were some kind of code.  

She took a short look at it, and exclaimed “It says BOWIE!”.

Indeed, it does.  Of course, we immediately wondered what the rest of the font might look like, so we decided to try making it.  A quick web search led us to the free and awesome Glyphr Studio, and in five minutes, we were off.  We let Jonathan Barnbrook’s design of the five  B O W I E   characters set the rules, and we tried to follow them as closely as we could to create the rest.

Notes:

• Upper and lower-case are identical, and there are no punctuation symbols or digits.  
• Many of the decisions we made resulted from trying to follow the design rules set out by the original 5 letters. We prioritized following the rules over legibility and uniqueness of the letters. In the end it seems about as legible as the  B O W I E  code from the original design.
• Huge thanks to Matt LaGrandeur for making Glyphr Studio and helping with the test drive tool on this page.