Minimal Wim

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.

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

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.

That was painful to read!

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

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

Minimal readability

Great! I can't read anything!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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

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

It gets tiring after a few paragraphs.

great now do chinese

edit: or thai, or arabic