About ASCII art and Jgs font (2023) | Hacker News Reader

About ASCII art and Jgs font (2023)

velvetyne.fr

35 pointsLuc6 comments

This site certainly makes some interesting usability choices.

When the page loads, the article takes up about 25% of the screen, on the bottom right. It's basically in the exact place I wouldn't look for the content I loaded the page for.

Metadata about the article takes up just as much space at the article itself, a full quarter of the screen, even though it's only a few lines long. Once you start scrolling, there's just a massive empty gulf off to the left.

The menu is ... I didn't realize it was a menu at first.

It's actually much more readable on mobile, which might be a first for me

The font is definitely... unique, too. I thought it was going to build up to that font being the ascii art one, but that one looks much more pleasant to read than what the article is actually written in

Almost word for word what I was thinking! The UI doesn't really get in the way but it feels like it isn't quite designed for people. And the content is excellent. I'm oddly tickled by the uniqueness of it.

As I think it would be lost with a ASK HN, I'll just beg here, what other sites have you seen that take a completely different / odd / "special" approach to UI for ordinary presentations / purposes?

You might enjoy https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ .

You'd be right. Flash backs of course to BBS homepage / door designs. Getting the -=[[UNIX]=- to look just right. Or the layers of ///FILES\\\ to flash. The graffiti style was beyond me, but the tables and sketches were very pleasurable time sinks.

I once saw a TUI adventure game that had windows - game scene, profile, comms, etc. It required a substantial screen size to really work well, but it was outstanding in brevity and communications. And no colors.

The design of the font is quite interesting, but it's not universally applicable for text art work of course. Making ordinary punctuation and alphanumeric characters have the same connection properties as the line drawing and box characters comes at the expense of distorting text art that relies on conventional glyph shapes to make sub-cell slopes and whatnot work. There's stuff out there that relies on (say) the symmetry of opening and closing single quotes or the visual similarity of the dollar symbol and the capital letter S.

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