Buttered Crumpet, a custom typeface for Wallace and Gromit | Hacker News Reader

Buttered Crumpet, a custom typeface for Wallace and Gromit

jamieclarketype.com

237 pointstobr51 comments

It’s cute, and I’m trusting enough to believe them when it says 100% home made, but square images with a strong yellow tint will forever be associated with ChatGPT 4o image generation in my mind. Unfortunately, this might become something like the em-dash—where artists start tweaking their work to look less like the AI’s that are copying them.

The cheese pattern and the green teacup pattern after it are obviously AI generated. The weird curve of the wedges, the fuzzy edges to the cheese holes, the artifacting around the edges of the teacups, the fact that neither is a perfectly repeating pattern. It's 100% AI, even if the font may not be.

Even more obvious, look at the detail on the frame - it’s a unusual pattern that doesn’t repeat as you would expect.

In 15 years, the youths will become obsessed with that strange yellow cartoon style. They will crave that “vintage ChatGPT aesthetic”.

yeah, in the same way we all revisit our studio ghibli family photos from time to time

My back breaks in cringe anytime i see an ai ghibli picture. It is an instant negative for me.

When I saw the Italian PM post this it made me think about hara-kiri:

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/i...

I've seen nostalgia expressed for the CLIP guided diffusion aesthetic of 2021!

> this might become something like the em-dash—where artists start tweaking their work to look less like the AI’s that are copying them.

Literally how art has always worked

... right up until July 9, 1962, when one Mr. Andrew Warhola upset the tradition.

And pretty much ever since, too.

> Unfortunately, this might become something like the em-dash—where artists start tweaking their work to look less like the AI’s that are copying them.

So true! (And yes—I see what you did there.)

It's even happening to photos now. A few months ago I posted a "Bot alert!" on Nextdoor warning people about the latest scambot.

One person replied "It's funny to see a bot reporting a bot."

I asked how they discovered I was a bot.

"It's your profile photo. The facial expression is too good, and the smoothness of the background is too perfect. Has to be AI."

For the curious, it's the same photo as on my LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelgeary/

What they didn't know was how I took that selfie. I set up my Micro Four Thirds camera on a tripod in the front yard, with the world's best portrait lens: the Olympus 75mm f/1.8. I stood some 10-15 feet from it (this lens is equivalent to a 150mm lens on a full frame camera, i.e. a moderate telephoto) and used the remote control to take a few dozen shots as I let my face relax into various expressions.

I picked out 4-5 favorites and asked a friend about them. She said "This one. It has gravitas."

I don't even think it's that great a photo. But I suppose the "gravitas" makes it look like AI.

For a photo that really shows off what that 75mm lens can do, check out this one of our late dog Brownie, titled Pumpkin Brownie:

https://geary.smugmug.com/Pets/Dogs/i-dNMQW2v/A

Enjoyed your photos, thanks for explaining about how they were made.

100% Homemade is just a stock phrase that they are using to display the type-face. I don't think you should take that to mean anything more than "Feathers McGraw."

Your brain is cooked.

LLM cliches are just condensed real world cliches.

Work as middle of the road as this sits right at the heart of that. It’s supposed to be warm and it’s entirely digital, hence the ways of conveying warmth are the same.

I have worked with Aardman. Unsurprisingly everything is shot digitally.

Is it intentional that the baseline vertical offset doesn’t seem consistent? Text set in this has a sort of up-and-down sloppy effect. Otherwise I love it.

Edit: it mostly seems that capitals appear higher than lowercase. It feels like there’s more inconsistency though, like the designer didn’t pay attention to eg the perceived “bottom” of curved characters vs flat-bottom ones.

I was just coming here to say, it looks like each letter is about to fall over backwards.

IMO for a cartoon like W&G a little wonkiness and skew is entirely on-point.

It seems intentionally cartoonishly irregular.

Doesn't seem like a ton of attention has been paid to kerning, either. The 'he' pair seems especially noticeable to me, which occurs several times in the "somewhere where there's cheese" image. I don't know enough about font design to guess whether the 'bad' kerning is intentional for the typeface, though - so I could be off base.

Simply the "I" and "N" baselines on "Cracking" is wildly (un-professionally) off! Took a screenshot and there's +/- three pixels or so with no artistic justification for it. Even Comic Sans has a consistent baseline!

Really feel like this ought to have been named Wensleydale.

(this is awesome)

EDIT: I'm wrong

Wensleydale is a place in Yorkshire, and a style of cheese, not specific to any one brand, so you could.

I'm not sure it's a brand name so much as a type of cheese.

"It's cheese, Gromit!"

Was the crumpet buttered with "I can't believe it's not butter"?

( The typeface looks a lot like https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/i-cant-believe-i... )

There are a lot of similarities. You must either have a great memory for fonts, or eat a lot of butter alternative spread, either way good eye!

It's interesting; I'd imagine very similar design briefs (friendliness, breadliness, etc)

The ICBINB font is almost a semi-serif, almost like a sans serif that's slightly melted, whereas I'd say the crumpet is fully serif. The "e", "L" and "v" are pretty different. And I'd say the ICBINB font lends itself better to tighter spaces, whereas the crumpet font seems to beg for more space.

But certainly, I could see one being used to replace another in a pinch - but I'm not a font specialist (graphologist? Is there a word for a person who studies fonts?)

Yeah. It's convergent evolution towards bouba-ness. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect)

TIL I learned that Wikipedia accepts forward slashes in article slugs.

Ah, a British convergence! That phrase always makes me think of this now (from the Vicar of Dibley): https://youtu.be/37ficiqoE6U

RIP Emma Chambers

Nice find! That looks like Cooper Black, which the article cites as inspiration.

I watched S1,Ep2 yesterday. When Wallace took down a picture of a pink pig to open the wall safe and then took out a pink piggy bank, I almost lost it. Classic!

When I look at the text on the whole it seems that individual characters are not aligned properly, or maybe not vertical enough, or something like this. But when I look at individual characters to confirm it, I don't see any misalignment. How does it work?

Yeah they looked like they were wobbling while I read them until I focused on them more.

Just a note, if you want a special whimsical typeface, there are any number of talented folk on fiverr and similar that will make you one. Well worth it. For the cost of a lunch I got this turned into a font that I really like…

"Imagine an advanced alien race of octopus-like creatures who don't use writing. They encounter humans, enslave some and take them on their spaceships, but find they have to label things for the humans to read. Make me a font that is how these creatures would approximate our writing systems by miming the letters with their tentacles."

It's a glorious sinuous typeface which I use for labeling drawers and bins in my semi-industrial space.

You deserve your own personal typeface.

That's beautiful, I'd love a monospaced variant of this to replace Comic Mono in my IDE/Fira Mono in my terminal. IANA font expert though, would that even be possible?

Is there a nerdfont variant?

Fonts are such an underappreciated art form. Love this

Too few people appreciate typefaces. Are they under-overall though? Those who do appreciate get really, really, really into them. I'm sure it nets out. :-)

I feel like hipster typography is as much an intrinsic part of 2010s design culture as cafes that look like farmhouses, or startups named after common nouns. Saturday Night Live made a sketch about Papyrus nearly ten years ago:

https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/how-ryan-goslings-papyrus-becam...

Shouldn't there be some holes?

Anyone know a similar-ish font? I'd love to use one, and this looks great to me.

Cabrito was designed for a children’s book about letters in the Kickstarter era. There are heavy cuts that feel similar. Maybe a little more playful: https://www.myfonts.com/collections/cabrito-font-insigne

It's halfway between Comic Sans and the 1970s "Groovy" font.

The kerning on this makes me itchy. Everything seems oddly spaced.

Very cute and charming!

There's a miniscule dent on the top of the capital B that's really bothering me. Idk, I know everyone's a critic, but it just doesnt sit right with me

I clearly don't have refined appreciation of visual typographic nuance because I do not see this at all.

It's quite round and looks pretty good.

hey! a local designer. this looks great.

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