Two Novel(ish) Segmented Display Designs
You are almost certainly familiar with the seven-segment number display design, commonly used on calculators and a variety of other devices.
There is a small online community based around creating other segmented display designs. For instance, there’s the subreddit /r/SegmentedDisplays. The typical challenge is to accomplish some goal — most commonly, displaying the ten Arabic numerals — with the most elegant design. For my designs, I prefer to take on the additional constraints that 1) segments may not cross over each other and 2) disjoint segments cannot be considered one segment, even if they always turn on and off together.
This is a purely intellectual, and to some degree artistic, exercise. There are vanishingly few applications, even historically, for these minimalist designs. In truth, the seven-segment design is the optimal solution. Purposeless as it may be, I’ve created two designs that I dare say are among the best four and five-segment number display layouts out there, based on my survey of online designs. I made a sleepy video going over many of these online designs and presenting my own, but this post will only show my two contributions. Without further ado:
This is the five-segment design. The notable compromises are the small zero, the disconnected two, and the foot on the four. For eliminating two segments from the traditional seven-segment display, these are minor losses! Of course, you also lose many of the character representations that are possible with seven segments, but for numerical displays, this could do the job.
Next, going down to the lowest number of possible segments that can represent 10 distinct digits:
Certainly, some elegance is lost in going down a segment. The remaining segments become more complicated so as to be able to do more work. Since LCDs are manufactured with photolithography, these sorts of shapes would not have been much of a problem to manufacture in LCD form (consider LCD games that had even more sophisticated segments), but it does detract a bit from the aesthetic. On the other hand, it does quite well considering how difficult it is to cover the ten numerals with so few segments.
Minimal-segment display designing is one of those curious little art-adjacent challenges that seem easier than they turn out to be. If you’ve got free time, or you’re not at risk of getting fired from your job for procrastinating, I encourage you to try making your own designs.