I watched a TechnologyConected video about the Numitron 7-segment displays. In the beginning, Alec showed the first variants of the now ubiquitous segmented displays. He mentioned a patent by George Mason dated 1898 and said that though it was the true alpha-numeric display the font it produced was "creepy". I love font design, calligraphy, and everything about letters and I was definitely against such a harsh description. I thought the font and the display itself as it was described in a drawing was beautiful! Anyway, I sent a link to the patent to a friend who happens to be a graphical designer and asked if I was wrong thinking that this thing has potential as a font. He said that it definitely looked interesting and unusual and later that day sent me a mock-up in figma where you could switch segments on and off and make letters. I was amused by this and though I had other projects to work on I thought it would be pretty simple but cool to bring this display to life.

(Later I was informed that someone already did this very thing (of course they did) so even though my project has slightly different goals and idea, I can't not mention them here. The first one is Resurrecting 21-Segment Victorian Displays by Max Maxfield. And another one is a collection of segmented fonts and an easy way to test them in your browser by Marcin Wichary.)

So I asked him to share SVG of the segment's outlines so I could tinker with it. Then I made a quick sketch in Fusion to better imagine what it might look like IRL.

I went to @CNLohr's discord server and asked if anyone had an idea how to better achieve this and later had a good brainstorm with Willmore and other participants of the weekend's meeting. In the end, @CNLohr convinced me that it was not worth trying to do multiplexing with added parts like a shift-registers or another V003 and that addressable LEDs barely cost anything more considering total BOM.

I have a natural anxiety about ordering PCBs overseas unless the thing is somewhat worked out beforehand in some form of a prototype. Also, it's easier for me to make 1-2 prototype PCBs at home than order 5-10 > wait 2 weeks > receive them be busy with something else, and come to actually assembling them months later.

I decided to do a trick and drive two segments in parallel but then I forgot to pay attention to the placement of those 2 particular LEDs.

They ended up in the wrong segments, which if driven together didn't make any sense for the font. So I had to disconnect one of them that makes a diagonal part in some letters.
And that's exactly what every second person was pointing out in the comments when I uploaded a video of a prototype to youtube:

I guess, that's a good way to bump up the numbers of comments. Just make a simple mistake and pretend you haven't noticed :) (I bet all those streamers on twitch do it every time)