Cool project! When are the custom cursors? :)
Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
31–40 of 177 posts
Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#32The font blurs slightly on my Windows 10 machine at 125% zoom.
Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#33I 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 eff…
I have a ton of respect both for font design in any constraints and the reverse engineering effort required to produce old pixelated text in modern web browsers. But it still made it significantly harder for me to read, and I hope this isn’t something anyone will try to reproduce for real world use, because it’s not just a matter of taste at that point, it’s a matter of accessibility.
Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#34I 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.
I found it interesting due to the amount of effort it took to produce an inaccurate and barely legible approximation, at least on my web browser. Then I dug around the Fontconfig documentation and tried a couple of things. Changing 'hintstyle' to 'hintfull' produced much better, albeit imperfect, results.
Why go to this effort? I find the sharpness and contrast of screen fonts much more readable than anti-aliased fonts, at least under ideal circumstances (e.g. the screen font supports a given font size at a given resolution). Unfortunately, those ideal circumstances are incredibly rare these days.
Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#35Ligatures 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…
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Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could format my table layout with the font to make it pixel perfect, assuming a white on white color scheme. /s
The other day I discovered https://favicon.cc , "in beta" since 2007. Instead of canvas it uses a html table for drawing (as well as the 1:1 preview!)
HTTPS is broken on non-www site. Try https://www.favicon.cc
Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There was plenty of good graphical design on the web in the 90s. There was also a lot of bad graphical design which usually gets highlighted today.
There was an underlying issue that web design was difficult before browsers supported CSS 2.1 well. You really couldn't get HTML elements to fit a graphical design reliably. CSS 1 didn't really have the ability and table layouts were pretty coarse. Using raster graphics was pretty much the only way to get fancy designs to look right across browsers.
Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Many elements were owed to CRT displays and larger pixel sizes, so rather domain specific. E.g., the mandatory drop shadow typography wasn't to be seen in print. On the other hand, I wouldn't like to witness modern screen design on a CRT. Moreover, the 1990s came just after a massive retro design trend in the 1980s and there were still some informal reference to 1950s design around, countered by a rather blocky "who cares" trend (probably rooting in free-style/low-end design as featured by April Greiman in screen design and new electronic trends in print as by Emigre Graphics), even featuring illegibility. At the same time any custom elements had to match the few "probably installed" type faces (Times/Times New Roman, Helvetica/Arial, Verdana, Courier/Courier New, maybe Symbol). Moreover, fonts rendered in sizes relative to OS presets, most probably what was 12px on a Mac rendered like 14px on Windows (which is huge on a CRT in 72dpi standard resolution), and custom elements had to provide visual stabilization to accommodate the design to the various forms of rendering. Last, but not least, the entire environment of the presentation was rather blocky, from OS elements to the housing of the CRT, and you had to accommodate to this, as well.
Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#39The font blurs slightly on my Windows 10 machine at 125% zoom.
If you zoom to 200% it should look sharp again :)
Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
#40LOL! Funny how doing something in 2020 takes ten times the resources for doing the same thing in 1995. Every pixel on these fonts is now a complex vector path.
> ten times the resources for doing the same thing
Is it really ten times the resources, and really doing the same thing?
My computer today uses much less power than what I had in the '90s, and cost less too. It has an internal 4K display and two external 4K displays.
My '90s computer had a single 1280x1024 CRT where I always had to tweak the focus and alignment to get readable text. With no GPU, scrolling in an editor was always an exercise in patience, watching the text repaint line by line.
Today all my monitors are high-DPI, everything scrolls instantly, and those vector fonts are what allow for crisp, detailed, and readable text on each display.
Don't get me wrong, I think this '90s font site is a wonderful exercise in nostalgia and CSS ingenuity and is very cool!
But you couldn't get me to go back to those days.