My head hurts from just trying to read the first few paragraphs.
Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
21–30 of 177 posts
Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#22I can appreciate all sorts of tech nostalgia, but reading the intro my first thought was "wow this is cognitively impairing me" and then "please don't". Achieving it is surely a feat, but the actual effect is to make it as hard now to use my computer as it was over 20 years ago, because the type is illegible.
Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#23This is nice and reminds me of the early/late 90's. Was curious what motivated you to bring back the past!
Thank you! We're both lovers of retrocomputing, and I think especially right now it's easy to feel nostalgic for simpler times. We wanted to capture a bit of the wonder and weirdness of the early web, before corporate walled gardens took over and made everything look the same.
Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#24I can appreciate all sorts of tech nostalgia, but reading the intro my first thought was "wow this is cognitively impairing me" and then "please don't". Achieving it is surely a feat, but the actual effect is to make it as hard now to use my computer as it was over 20 years ago, because the type is illegible.
That's fair enough, i think it's a matter of taste, really. For me, it evokes a warm sense of nostalgia for a simpler time. Not that it necessarily was, and definitely not that it was better – i was a kid back then, so that has definitely coloured my memory of it all.
I see this more as a "just because we can" art project, than anything else.
EDIT: it also occurs to me that i have tons of respect for the hours of effort that would've gone into making fonts back then be beautiful at such small DPI. I think it's a good example of constraints producing interesting/good/impressive art. But i should avoid waxing too philosophical!
Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#25Very cool.
I know this is a tad off-topic, but, it's sort of related since it's about fonts.
I've been looking for a good "serial killer typewriter" typeface, similar to what's used in the credits of the TV show Supernatural, but I haven't found anything that looks particularly good. Does anybody have any recommendations? Free fonts would be preferred, but I'm willing to pay a bit for the right look.
Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#26FontForge is awesome! Used it a couple of times
Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#27You can still use bitmap fonts on the WWW. That said, most of the 90s webpages didn't look like that. Images were used instead. For example: http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/paulgraham_2202_166608
Lots more examples https://twitter.com/wayback_exe Edit: for contrast with more personal sites, try https://twitter.com/gifmodel/status/456761420319686656
I'm always amazed at how universally terrible graphic design was during the 90s, and I mean at the level of big-name corporations (not GeoCities laypeople). In-house Designers at these businesses (or contractors at the equally big-name firms they hired out to) were presumably well-educated and steeped in the history of the medium, but churned out nearly unintelligible, ugly garbage. Most of the design principles that have given us the mostly tasteful (if bland/inoffensive) modern web were solidified in print by the 1960s. I know the tooling wasn't there yet browser-wise to do anything crazy, but even the image-based graphical elements are just so foreign and weird, like the product of a generation so enamored with the capabilities of Photoshop that they didn't question unnecessary filters, drop shadows, and the placement of text.
Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#28The naïve potrace output looks very 90s in a grunge typography sort of way. I donated the archives of Serif magazine to the Scripps College library a decade ago which included a large collection of 1990s type specimens but I'm pretty sure that there was a T-26 face that looked very much like the sample that they showed from potrace.
Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#29Ligatures are missing :(
Look at the IE5 screenshot. The second last line has the word "finibus" and notice how the "f" and the "i" seem to be combined together. That's a ligature. In contrast in the body text of the website I don't see any. The word "file" in the paragraph right above the screenshot is missing that ligature.
Kerning is, well, also wrong. So wrong that I literally trouble reading the body text, but I have no trouble reading the text in the IE5 screenshot. (Bad kerning: once you see it you can't unsee it.)
Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#30Converting bitmap fonts to TrueType is far, far too hard in 2020. I've tried to do the same on numerous different occasions with FontForge and gave up every time through things just not working or hard crashes. I either got lucky by finding someone else who had already converted the font to TrueType somehow, or used a different font altogether. Since bitmap fonts are starting to become deprecated[0] in some window managers like i3 this process is starting to become a necessity.
Maybe there should be a library-based approach that provides the same functionality as potrace.