Minimal Wim

https://raffinaderij.booreiland.amsterdam/minimalwim/

by colinprince • 7 years ago

64 35 7 years ago

raffinaderij.booreiland.amsterdam

Nalta• 7 years ago

Great! I can't read anything!

chkaloon• 7 years ago

Minimal readability

andykx• 7 years ago

I don’t think readability is the goal here. This is more of an experiment - a mental exercise, even - than anything.

tartoran3• 7 years ago

Sometimes that could be used on purpose, for a banner etc. Having that struggle to decode it it makes it linger more in ones memory.

I find the presentation quite entertaining and visually stimulating.

noicebrewery• 7 years ago

great now do chinese

edit: or thai, or arabic

peteretep• 7 years ago

Thai would be fine if you increase line-spacing, and get proper ligatures for เเ◌ vs เ◌

knolax• 7 years ago

Seal script for Chinese already looks pretty similar[0]. Look at the 3rd and 6th one from the left.

[0] http://baby-pen.com.tw/index.php?route=product/product&produ...

jchw• 7 years ago

Interesting! It’s definitely pretty difficult to read some of the variations but it is quite stylish, I don’t think I’ve seen a typeface quite like this before.

hcarvalhoalves• 7 years ago

It gets tiring after a few paragraphs.

kaidon• 7 years ago

That was painful to read!

It kind of feels like cheating with all the shrinking/expanding of vertical/horizontal cells.

monokai_nl4• 7 years ago

Cheating, hacking, solving puzzles. What's the difference :) But yeah, it's not exactly 9 pixels.

asveikau2• 7 years ago

I don't know much about these topics, but the style looks very 1970s to me. Looked at the Wikipedia article on Wim Crouwel and it seems some of his typography was from the late 60s, so not far off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Crouwel

tartoran3• 7 years ago

Yes, looks 70s but is there anything wrong with that?

asveikau2• 7 years ago

Nope. No problem here. Don't know why you would think my comment was meant to suggest it. I am presently a fan of many things from that time period. Very good decade for music, for instance.

Seb-C• 7 years ago

I stopped reading after trying to scroll and seeing that the website messes with my scroll speed (and even worse, there is an annoying inertia effect).

Outside of this, the font may be useful for some specific design work, but it is unreadable.

aasasd• 7 years ago

Cool. Doesn't work at all in FF on Android, but at least I got to read the first two lines and the ‘scroll down’ message.

miloignis• 7 years ago

Works fine for me! Both regular FF and FF Preview on Android 10.

ricc• 7 years ago

I don't know where the "hate" is coming from... Or maybe I just see this more as art and not something to be taken seriously as a technical suggestion.

cies• 7 years ago

me too: i thought it was a wonderfully artistic/design tool. no a replacement font for your terminal (what seems that most were expecting judging from their comments of disappointment)

monokai_nl4• 7 years ago

Author here. This started as one of our monthly days of experimenting at our design agency https://booreiland.amsterdam — The concept of those days is to create something (anything) in 8 hours. The prototype of this was done in the day after Crouwel passed away so that basically was my starting point. I knew he worked a lot with grid-based type (and earned the nickname Gridnik because of that).

I see a lot of comments about readability. That's not really the point though, although I tried my best. It's more of a programming and design puzzle, to see what happens if all you have is a 3×3 grid.

OliverM• 7 years ago

I really enjoyed it, even if I did think it was going to be recommendations for a text editor config initially. How was it built? Looking through the compiled JS, it looks like it uses PixiJS (https://pixijs.download/dev/docs/index.html)?

monokai_nl4• 7 years ago

Thanks! It uses PixiJS for rendering, the rest is custom JS.

xenihn• 7 years ago

I found it really hard to read, but I loved the presentation. It was definitely a much smoother parallax effect than the one that Apple did for the iPhone 11 launch page (though I'm assuming they've since fixed it). You should definitely be proud.

itronitron• 7 years ago

very neat, it would be interesting to see the 3x3 grid encoding used for steganography, especially in a game. Incidentally, this is another reason that Minecraft needs a vertical slab, an open trapdoor is one option but has a limited palette.

duckerude• 7 years ago

An interesting font by Wim Crouwel himself, much in the same spirit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Alphabet

monokai_nl4• 7 years ago

Did you know it was used on one of the album covers for Joy Division?

Someone• 7 years ago

As that page says: on the album “Substance”.

That page doesn’t mention the spelling error (possibly intentionally, as the ‘m’ looks weirder than the ‘n’) in the title (cover image on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_(Joy_Division_album) )

tomcooks• 7 years ago

It's the reason why the font was made eh

rvense• 7 years ago

The font isn't very readable, but the website is very impressive.

pnako• 7 years ago

Unreadable stuff + horrible scroll based interface. Whatever it is, it is not good design.

yiyus• 7 years ago

I think a font like this would fit perfectly in colorForth. Combining the Shannon encoding used by Chuck Moore [1] with a similar font would be an interesting exercise.

This font in particular is great. I am always intrigued by experiments that try to take minimalism to the extreme.

[1] https://colorforth.github.io/chars.html

ageofwant• 7 years ago

Yea can't read that.

Thanks for doing the hard slog of filtering all the things that does not work, so others may avoid them :-)

As whoever said: "I did not fail, I discovered a thousand ways of not making a light bulb"

edynoid• 7 years ago

This website consumes about half my CPU. But for what?

tempodox• 7 years ago

Very designed. I'm just glad I don't have to read that font on a regular basis. One of those sad cases where “design” is the diametrical opposite of usability.

Minimal Wim

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