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This is an experiment from 2011 in which the author produced a font by averaging all the fonts on their system.

I'm reposting it here because I noticed that this looks a lot like the uncanny valley produced when an image AI tries to make text, which makes perfect sense: it's a statistical average of fonts.





It also reminds me a bit of what text looks like after multiple rounds of photocopying. Like the handouts we'd get in grade school.

And the smell of weird, purple mimeograph[1] ink.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph


For some reason, that smell is one of my favorite memories from my early school years. I really liked it.

That combined with the magic of "Wow! Copies?!"


[2]

[2]: I just wanted to add the most unnecessary footnote formatting possible as a kindness, so yours would no longer hold the crown as worst


That's clever, but:

I've been called out previously here for having unknowingly introduced some undefined terms to readers, and which they found to be perplexing.

And I took that to heart, because I don't want my words to be perplexing. I instead want them to be clear and easily understood.

In my corner of the world, I haven't held a mimeographed document in my hands for ~35 years. I found it reasonable to assume that a non-zero amount of people here might find the term to be unfamiliar.

So I provided definition of the term on the basis that it may be unknown to some readers, and that more information is better than inadequate information.

In this instance I would have preferred to use hyperlinked text for visual brevity, but that's not a thing on HN. The normal and accepted style on HN consists instead of using footnotes.

And at this point, generating footnotes is nearly entirely muscle memory for me. So a footnote (with a URL) was included.

Thank you for your attention on this matter, fsckboy. I'm pleased to discover that you've found my footnote to be so unusually compelling.


I don’t get uncanny valley feel from this one. It feels kind of great for me as a font.

Same. It looks like the print you see in old books. Very pleasing to the eye. The lower case 'm' sticks out to me though, the second hump is raised a little too high.

Interestingly it evokes Open Dyslexic.

Yes, I saw the exact same thing when you posted it - "oh, AI text looks like an averaging of fonts".

I wonder if you can ask AI to use a particular font for text in generated images.

Interesting how modern designers think readable fonts (with serifs, so people can reliably distinguish between Al and AI, for example) are "uncanny" because they don't follow the latest trends in ultra-minimalist "design" and other fashions.

Most serif fonts look too noisy to me, I made a website the other day and set a serif font and it immediately stood out to me as cluttered. I have zero design sense, though, so this is just an opinion.

I like readable serif fonts but this one really looks like an uncanny AI image.



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