Comment by ascorbic

9 hours ago

Ah, that'll be useful. The hardest thing about adding a new project to my site is finding a new HyperCard/System 6 icon. https://mk.gg/

5 comments

ascorbic

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heliumtera  9 hours ago

Hey, I really loved the fonts on your website.

For the past 10 years I've being using terminus bitmap font, so I have strong opinions about it. The only reason I prefer Firefox is because it supports bitmap.

Reading your website on my phone made my day! Lovely fonts/aesthetics

zahlman  8 hours ago

I get that I'm critiquing you within your apparent wheelhouse, but this aesthetic also matters a lot to me.

  img[data-astro-cid-vnzlvqnm] {
    width: 48px;
    height: 48px;
    image-rendering: pixelated;
    object-fit: contain;
    margin-bottom: 0.5rem;
  }

I understand the goal here, but it works really poorly IMO when the source images are generally 32x32 (and some of them are smaller to arbitrary degrees because the content has been cropped — this doesn't seem to distort aspect ratios, but e.g. the "eye" icon gets stretched to fill the space, and thus scales with a bespoke 48/25 factor). Meanwhile the hover cursor looks pixel-precise, but definitely too big compared to the icons. (It seems to have been scaled 2x ahead of time, from an authentic 16x16.) The background scale is also pixel-precise (I don't know whether it's 2x scaled just to scale it, or to look like a 2x2 "pattern") so the difference in approaches is just really jarring to me.

(I think the font is also doing some anti-aliasing; probably can't really control that. It looks really cool, though.)

I would really recommend not cropping to content, and either using integer-scale boxes or just accepting some sampling interpolation. Or just leaving everything at 1:1 scale. It'd be noticeably physically smaller than authentic for typical desktop displays, but that's just hardware doing what it does. (And as it stands, it might be bigger than authentic!) Bonus points for a `@media` query on device resolution to make the choice.

(Edit: after reading through https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P... I'm not really sure Firefox is working as advertised...? But I think x1.5 scaling for pixel art is always going to involve compromise.)

  • ascorbic  1 hour ago

    As I mentioned, images are the hardest to do because beyond the core icons, the available graphics vary massively in size. Displaying them at "actual size" makes them far too small to be usable on a modern screen. I think you're also probably misremembering the scale of the cursor. It's not perfect, but it's not meant to be 16x16. Take a look at https://hcsimulator.com/

    The approach I took is the best I could manage without hand-modifying every image. You're right that some of them are not as good as they should be. The ones that I did hand-make (the background, as you noticed, and the window chrome) are the ones that are pixel-perfect.

    The fonts took a lot of work to control the anti-aliasing. You'll see they vary quite a bit between monitors, OSs and browsers. Generally they look best in Firefox on a Mac retina display, because that's what I created them in.