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Pixelambacht
Personal blog · pixelambacht.nldesignweb
Pixelambacht is a personal blog at pixelambacht.nl about design and web. Since 2014, 36 different Hacker News readers have linked it 38 times, most often “Sans Bullshit Sans: leveraging the synergy of ligatures”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Front-end antics and typographic mischievousness
Most-linked posts?
- Sans Bullshit Sans: leveraging the synergy of ligatures9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2015-02-26
- Sans Bullshit Sans: leveraging the synergy of ligatures (2015)7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2016-06-17
- Github became the web's largest font piracy site (2017)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-09-21
- /2013/css3-c64/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-01-31
- Compyx: creating a multicolor 8‑bit font for browsers2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-06-07
- Saving the Internet 2000TB a Day: Fixing Font Awesome’s Fonts2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-12-08
What Hacker News says?
There's this: http://pixelambacht.nl/2013/css3-c64/
Comment linking /2013/css3-c64/
on “NES.css – NES-Style CSS Framework”Submitted Saving the Internet 2000TB a Day: Fixing Font Awesome’s Fonts as a story · 506 points
HN discussionIf you like to know about what goes into creating a font like this, check my post about it: http://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/ It's mostly command line tools, so don't worry about any artistic ability (I didn't).
Comment linking /2015/sans-bullshit-sans/
on “Sans Bullshit Sans”Submitted Sans Bullshit Sans: leveraging the synergy of ligatures (2015) as a story · 203 points
HN discussionThe more interesting part for me was how they made it http://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/ TL;DR version: they made a font with custom ligatures, so that the sequence of glyphs that make 'synergy' are replaced with a single 'bullshit' glyph!
Comment linking /2015/sans-bullshit-sans/
on “Sans Bullshit Sans”Submitted Github became the web's largest font piracy site (2017) as a story · 178 points
HN discussionBoth of these ligatures (fi and ->) in standard computer fonts like TTF or OTF use exactly the same technology. The only difference is that one ligature applies to alphabetic characters and the other to non-alphabetic characters. Ligatures can be used to make some font aesthetically pleasing like this: http://www.impallari.com/lobster/ Or they can be abused like this: https://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/…
Comment linking /2015/sans-bullshit-sans/
on “Sublime Text 3 now has font ligature support”Submitted Ten lines of code that changed my world as a story · 148 points
HN discussionI enjoyed this thorough breakdown of the different technologies. "Colorful typography on the web: get ready for multicolor fonts" http://www.pixelambacht.nl/2014/multicolor-fonts/ In particular, it expands on the details behind Adobe/Mozilla's SVG approach, as well as browser support.
Comment linking /2014/multicolor-fonts/
on “Color Emoji in Windows 8.1 – The Future of Color Fonts?”Submitted Compyx: creating a multicolor 8‑bit font for browsers as a story · 60 points
HN discussionFont Awesome allows stacking: http://blog.fontawesome.io/2014/09/25/custom-file-types-with... Here's their demo but with some color added: http://codepen.io/anon/pen/VYQMea But yeah, you're typically stuck with one color. Here's a demo that shows off multi-color fonts (Firefox only): http://pixelambacht.nl/2014/compyx-a-multicolor-8bit-font/ That technique could be used to make multi-color font icons if it were cros…
Comment linking /2014/compyx-a-multicolor-8bit-font/
on “Show HN: Littlebox, a pure CSS icon library – worth continuing?”Submitted LapisLegit, a font to test the OpenType SVG table as a story · 25 points
HN discussionThe blog post explaining the implementation[0] says the source of the buzzwords was a list “250 Buzzwords We Love To Hate” published on May 13, 2014[1]. [0] https://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/ [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140516035753/http://www.ngenwo...
Comment linking /2015/sans-bullshit-sans/
on “Sans Bullshit Sans (2015)”Submitted Sans Bullshit Sans: leveraging the synergy of ligatures as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThere are ways to use multiple colors: http://www.pixelambacht.nl/2014/multicolor-icons/
Comment linking /2014/multicolor-icons/
on “Devicons, an iconic font made for developers”Submitted How CNN, Yahoo and Fox News are wasting 13 terabytes a month on webfonts as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis is also done by Project Seen [0,1] and sans bullshit sans [2]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9783275 [1]: http://projectseen.com/ [2]: https://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/
Comment linking /2015/sans-bullshit-sans/
on “Apple-sans-adjectives – A font that redacts Apple-esque superlatives from text”Submitted How GitHub became the web's largest font piracy site (and how to fix it) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionHere is a nice article from a similar project that explains the trick in detail: http://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/
Comment linking /2015/sans-bullshit-sans/
on “Project Seen”Submitted Saving the internet 2000 terabytes a day: fixing Font Awesome as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThe accompanying article by the developers has a really good explanation of how they pulled this off and font hacking in general. And if one was so inclined, it outlines all the steps necessary to add more buzzwords to the font. http://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/ Here's the git if you want to play around with it: https://github.com/RoelN/SansBullshitSans
Comment linking /2015/sans-bullshit-sans/
on “Sans Bullshit Sans”Submitted Sans Bullshit Sans: A font to fight against BS as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou should find http://pixelambacht.nl/2014/multicolor-fonts/ an interesting read.
Comment linking /2014/multicolor-fonts/
on “Announcing Unicode 7.0”Submitted Blackout: breaking browsers with a font as a story · 3 points
HN discussionRelated: http://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/
Comment linking /2015/sans-bullshit-sans/
on “Show HN: Don't Name the Shooter”Submitted ComicSans.conf, or: fonts have settings too as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSee https://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/ for more information on creating a font with ligatures.
Comment linking /2015/sans-bullshit-sans/
on “Zilla Slab: A common language through a shared font”Submitted Building Bixa Color, a color font for the web as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere are several color font formats. This one can't do gradients. You can check your browser's support at https://pixelambacht.nl/chromacheck/ . SBIX is Apple's format and it basically just embeds PNGs in the font which isn't scalable. COLRv0 is Microsoft's format and it basically just stacks single-color glyphs, so it's scalable but doesn't do gradients. COLRv1 is newer (2019) and adds support for gradients. Opent…
Comment linking /chromacheck/
on “Customizing Color Fonts on the Web”Submitted Sans Bullshit Sans: leveraging the synergy of ligatures as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
