I have ES/1 writing to the screen in graphics mode. The 3dfx voodoo3 2000 card I'm using does 132x60 text natively (132x80 if you load an 8x6 font), but graphics-wise it is late 90s tech and only goes up to 1280x1024x24 colors, but it's enough for testing. Even in that mode I'm using an 8x14 font and am able to get a 160x43 console window. I have to use "bigreal" or "unreal" mode to access the frame buffer to write data (which is far beyond 1 MB in memory -- this particular card is using 0xfa000000 for the start of the buffer), which means everything is running through some extra assembly steps to populate the on-screen content. It makes it pretty slow right now (about 1 second to write content to the entire screen) using my 2.2 GHz AMD64-based CPU. Once I get the graphics engine working decently, I can switch to my more modern video card and use higher resolutions at faster speeds on its faster bus (the 3dfx card is just PCI).
ES/1 should support general purpose graphics, including a desktop, mouse pointer, flashing caret (cursor where you type), multiple text-based console windows, a mini-Presentation Manager for real graphical apps, and be able to run several separate programs simultaneously.
I'll be using my own design "dynamic scalable font" (DSF) engine for all fonts. I plan to also have a setup tool to allow you to create your own fonts using its design (James 4:15 -- Lord willing). My first fonts are libsf.dsf and libsf_mono.dsf, which are similar to Ubuntu's font design, but a little less bold, narrower, and with some character changes.
I'm fairly happy with how things are progressing. It's slow and steady work. I hope to have an ES/1 kernel booting with a pre-alpha static image in Jan.2018. It would be developed enough to allow different people to see if it boots, has a mouse pointer, does graphics, responds to mouse, keyboard, and timer events, etc, so I could get some feedback.