The elevator at my company has a reputation for getting stuck from time to time. If I ever get into that situation, I sure hope it won’t happen on the third floor! I would be tearing out my eyes before any technician arrives.

Yeah, yeah, okay – the display is kind of high res, way beyond the scale of pixel-perfect hinting (and a font rarely aligns with perfect 45° angles anyway). But it’s still coarse enough to distinctly display this irritating discontinuity. What kind of monster designs something like that?!

PS: If you like pixel nitpicking, you’ll love this: Hardest Problem in Computer Science: Centering Things

Hmm, is this typographically correct or am I off by a pixel? [sweating noises]

I love the story of how the famous Juggler animation came to be, as recollected by Amiga raytracing pioneer Eric Graham:

[…] I was thinking of adding a room onto my house, and rather than start the work I decided to write a modeling and rendering program. But first I re-implemented the ray tracer. It took about a week to get running, and then another week or two to make a few models and put the compression scheme together. That was November and the Juggler was born.

(source: The Juggler by Ernie Wright)

It’s funny how this lasagna of little detours gave us one of the most iconic showcases of the Amiga’s capabilities. “Let’s build a room! Wait, why not plan it properly, and write a modelling tool? But first, I need to write a raytracer real quick! And for that, design a test scene and animation of course.” :)

Given the story’s punchline:

The room never was added to the house.

…I cannot help but smirk when I imagine Eric G. being asked what he’s hacking up at his computers all the time. “Why, I’m planning that extra room of course, what does it look like I’m doing?!”

I stumbled upon this older article on web standards and web design:

• Old CSS, new CSS
  A history of doing “web stuff” from the 1990s to today

A comprehensive, opinionated and entertaining article, and a special pleasure to read if you’ve been through a similar journey (I sure have). <font> and <center>, table layouts, frames, the terror regime of Internet Explorer, DHTML, and the bumpy road to modern CSS: it’s all there.

It ends with a little catalogue of all the nice things we have now – something I still want to fully catch up with, one day…

Case study: 1996’s spacejam.com’s markup. Image by eevee, see the article

A great read with a cherry on top: In the comments, the very people responsible for some of the milestones of web technologies chime in, casually mentioning things like “Oh, this is my fault” or “Actually, I invented that”!

(via /r/programming; old Hacker news discussion, current)

Ein tolles Hobby in den späten 1990ern, wenn man ein CD-ROM-Laufwerk besaß: Font-CDs sammeln! So viele hippe, futuristische, stylishe Fonts, die man in seine Webdesigns und in die Abizeitung einbauen konnte, es war traumhaft.

Nachteil: Die allermeisten Schriftarten hatten natürlich keine Fett- oder Kursivschnitte, und an exotische Sonderzeichen wie Umlaute oder Akzente haben die Amateur-Schriftologen aus Amerika auch keinen Gedanken verschwendet.

Sprich: Äs, Ös, Üs und Eszetts wurden stümperhaft nachgebaut („hier einfach zwei Pünktchen, passt“), verschämt als „ue“ und „ss“ umgeschrieben oder durch Zeichen aus komplett anderen Schriften ersetzt – das gehörte irgendwann zur ganz bestimmten Ästhetik enthusiastischer DTP-Einsteiger. Mehr coole Schriften = mehr Design! :)

Dank TikTok erlebt dieser Retro-Trend gerade eine Renaissance, und es ist kein Ende abzusehen. Irgendwie schoen und mysteriÖs: Wo findet man heute eigentlich noch Fonts ohne Umlaute? Oder sind die Untertitel-Tools schuld?

I made an entry for the animated JIF GIF palette-based pixel image compo at Revision 2024. Special thanks to Revision host Lynn for trolling everyone when introducing this compo and setting the mood – or was it even trolling? After all, /dʒɪf/ is the correct pronounciation. Anyway, I was laughing hard! :)

It even won a trophy, reaching third place in the compo. w00t!

Some background and making of: Shall we play a game?