You have to change the anti-alias setting from "sharp" or "crisp" to "none" when you're in the font tool, that should allow you to make your fonts smaller and sharper.

Oh my God...I love Barry Zuckerkorn. But may you please make an icon for Tobias Funke?

And may you please try to persuade Ben to watch Arrested Development? I can't.

So much pleasure to be had.

Please make this: Buster "I'm going to run this on the pots and pans cycle."

Many icons use the pixel10 font, which is designed to be legible at, well, around 10 pixels in height.

Cree and the Fonz? Awesome.

Something that helps to make text legible: rasterize the text, then go to layer options, do a drop shadow, reduce its distance from the text to 0, and increase the size of the drop shadow, so that the text shows up better against the background. Change it to white or black, and to screen or multiply, as necessary. Adding stroke to the layer can also help, but sometimes makes things look cluttered.

I realized in retrospect that I should have just mentioned the sharp/crisp thing, like the commenter above.