
Minimal Wim - colinprince
https://raffinaderij.booreiland.amsterdam/minimalwim/
======
monokai_nl
Author here. This started as one of our monthly days of experimenting at our
design agency [https://booreiland.amsterdam](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
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](https://pixijs.download/dev/docs/index.html))?

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

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asveikau
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Crouwel)

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

~~~
asveikau
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.

~~~
tartoran
Sorry for the incorrect interpretation, it felt like a criticism with the
assumption that 70s is passe. I love a lot of 70s things as well.

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ricc
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
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)

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kaidon
That was painful to read!

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

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

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

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

~~~
Someone
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)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_\(Joy_Division_album\))
)

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chkaloon
Minimal readability

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

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Nalta
Great! I can't read anything!

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

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

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yiyus
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](https://colorforth.github.io/chars.html)

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itronitron
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.

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Seb-C
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.

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jchw
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.

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ageofwant
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"

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tempodox
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.

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

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

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hcarvalhoalves
It gets tiring after a few paragraphs.

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noicebrewery
great now do chinese

edit: or thai, or arabic

~~~
knolax
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...](http://baby-
pen.com.tw/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=1842)

