Little Character

The story of a font that was almost lost to history.

Project description: 

Little Character is a digital resurrection of a font that once lived exclusively in the UI of a 1980s PCB design program. Equal parts typeface restoration and design archaeology, this project began with a typographic itch and spiraled into a full-blown historical investigation, culminating in the recreation and expansion of a long-forgotten gem from the early days of digital design.

Role:

Designer

How it started

In 2013 I learned EAGLE, a tool for designing printed circuit boards, I found myself completely taken by the default system font. It was crisp, legible, and weirdly beautiful, especially at small sizes. I didn’t think much of it at the time.

In 2025, while working on the Bela Gem hardware, I wanted to revisit that typeface. But when I looked for it, I hit a wall. It didn’t exist outside EAGLE. It wasn’t in any font library, type archive, or software package I could find. It wasn’t even available for download from Autodesk, who had acquired EAGLE years prior.

What followed was a typographic treasure hunt, a search for a font that didn’t technically exist.

The hunt

The trail began with the early Bela hardware, which had been designed in EAGLE. I compared those PCBs to our more recent designs, which used KiCad. KiCad had a completely different font, and immediately it felt like a downgrade. The old font was better. Not in a nostalgic way, but in a very practical, legible, undeniably charming way.

I opened up EAGLE, rendered some text, and started taking screenshots. This font had everything I loved:

• Sharp diagonals, squat proportions
• True distinctions between glyphs like 0/O and 6/9
• Strange, wonderful inconsistencies, like the wild swing of the 7 and the belly-forward 5

It was clearly designed with intent, even if some of that intent had been lost to time. It had a voice. And I wanted to know who gave it that voice.

Finding the origins

My online searches turned up nothing. A lone Autodesk forum thread confirmed that the font was not distributed independently. This font seemed to be baked into EAGLE’s codebase, buried deep in its binaries; an invisible asset with no official name or file.

I needed backup. I ended up in touch with the podcast Hyperfixed, known for solving niche internet mysteries. They were game, and a few weeks later, they delivered.

It turns out that this beautiful font was a relic from 1986, originally designed by Borland Software, the same people who had created of Turbo Pascal. EAGLE was initially built in Turbo Pascal, and inherited this font from its development environment. The original name of this font was called LITT.CHR, short for “Little Character.”

Hyperfixed even tracked down Philippe Kahn, Borland’s founder (and the inventor of the camera phone), who confirmed that he co-designed the font with a graphic designer named Lisa. Their goal was to create a legible vector font that would work on 1980s systems with severely limited memory.

Listen to the Hyperfixed episode Little By Little here to hear the whole story.

Bringing it to life

With its lineage confirmed, I set out to bring LITT.CHR back to life.

I redrew each character from scratch, referencing screenshots and old PCB images, and used FontForge to compile an initial version. I released it as an open-source font on GitHub as a basic Latin set, faithful to the original.

Then Google Fonts reached out.

They were interested in including the font, but to do so, I’d need to expand it - significantly. That meant adding over 200 Latin characters and diacritics to create a fully international character set. I dove deep into type anatomy, spacing systems, and the often-ignored complexities of diacritic design.

After a month of iteration and kind feedback from type designers who spoke other languages, the new version was complete.

Naming it

I considered naming the font Lisa, in honor of the original co-designer. But there already is a font called Lisa, and that also didn’t feel quite right; I didn’t know who Lisa was, or if she’d even want that. 

I named it Little Character. This is a nod to the original filename LITT.CHR, and a reflection of the font’s own personality: humble, quirky, quietly brilliant.

Reflections

What began as a nostalgic itch became a cross-generational collaboration that spanned from the mid-80s to the present day. Little Character is a reminder that good design often hides in the margins, that software is full of ghosts, and that fonts aren't just letters. They're cultural artefacts, with personalities, histories, abilities, and moods all their own, and sometimes even a tiny vector font can have a big story to tell.

Little Character is now the font on Bela hardware products, like the recently-released Bela Gem Stereo and Bela Gem Multi.

Where to find it

• Download Little Character on GitHub. It’s free and open source. Use it wherever and however you want.
• Coming to Google Fonts in 2025
• Follow the project on Instagram at @litt.chr
  
  

Little Character is the font that works hard with a light touch.