BTW you can print it on a transparent film and use any coloured paper as a background layer or multiple with a different offsets and grade.
With a proper combo o depth you can get a very nice result.
srean 1 days ago [-]
Hey that's such a nice idea, of multiple layers.
Thanks to your idea, now I am imagining printing different layers of foreground and background on glass and stacking them with spacers for parallax.
willmeyers 1 days ago [-]
I was inspired by this site to run emojis through a dithering algorithm (https://dither-emojis.pages.dev/)! Nothing beats hand drawn though.
andrewstuart 23 hours ago [-]
They look good what was your process.
willmeyers 18 hours ago [-]
Sorry for taking so long to get back to you.
Basically I extracted the emojis from my Mac's system font. From there I downscaled them to 64x64 pixels and made them grayscale.
With this set of images I experimented with a few different algorithms. I ended up settling for just a regular ordered dithering (Bayer). But! It still didn't look that good. So what I ended up doing was normalizing the darks and lights for each emoji. This was because some emojis are lighter and darker than others. I wanted to create a uniform appearance for all of them.
So the process was (1) get emojis. (2) downscale + grayscale. (3) normalize tone. (4) dither. (5) then upscale
wlesieutre 22 hours ago [-]
Pebble has a set of black and white emojis to go with their OS's visual language. Lots missing, but the ones they have are nicely readable for watch notification purposes.
Not as detailed as these, and using 90/45 degree angles in keeping with the rest of their graphics.
I did play with adding the 1-bit NTT Docomo emojis, as well as the 1998 Softbank emojis, into LisaGUI (my 1-bit Lisa-themed web OS). The glyphs are at most 12 pixels squared, and fit comfortably with the existing Lisa typefaces I've added so far (although they appear vertically stretched when viewed in a 2:3 pixel aspect ratio). They are still not included and won't be until I devote some time to sorting out the slightly nightmarish shitshow that is parsing unicode emoji character sequences.
Love the website, fonts, UI and all of it! It brings back fun memories of my early Mac days.
SpyCoder77 19 hours ago [-]
On mobile if you zoom in the background gives you a headache
semolino 19 hours ago [-]
The page would benefit from
image-rendering: pixelated;
in the CSS which would probably(?) prevent the headache-inducing effect, which I'm guessing comes from the hard edges of the background image tiling contrasted with the bilinear upscale blur.
The site looks like it was abandoned in 2023, however.
mrhottakes 1 days ago [-]
This has me feeling nostalgic for Hypercard. Nice work!
andsoitis 1 days ago [-]
Cool. 1-bit hi-resolution emoji would be fire.
socalgal2 1 days ago [-]
What resolution? high enough and they will just appear gray scale. I think the point is for them to be low-res
SpyCoder77 19 hours ago [-]
The rendering on this blank character is wrong, it is visible
kristianp 15 hours ago [-]
The little crosses around the em-dashes? If I comment out the BitGeneva12 font in the css body they go away.
trollbridge 1 days ago [-]
Some things are just plain beautiful.
I would gladly use this as an emoji set (alongside Chicago or Monaco).
mathgladiator 1 days ago [-]
Awesome. I recently got a play.date device, so im getting into 1 bit pixel art for a game i am building. I am using as a forcing function 5o avoid the multitudes of rabbit holes possible with games. It is so refreshing!
mrpeek 21 hours ago [-]
Nice! I want a phone theme with this. Do you know any?
krupan 20 hours ago [-]
I was unprepared for the wave of nostalgia that hit me when I went to the hos website. Grandpa's Mac computer was so cool!!
bni 11 hours ago [-]
Another idea would be to make emojis that could be used as Amiga Workbench 1.3 icons. The Blue, white, orange and black kind.
guff_se 23 hours ago [-]
There’s an awful lot of emdashes in that text.
dbalatero 20 hours ago [-]
I type the emdash a lot myself; how do you know the author doesn't as well? The copy is simple and readable so even if it is AI, who cares?
krupan 20 hours ago [-]
I hate LLMs too, but these comments are getting old. Those of us from a certain generation (who grew up using computers that this website is mimicking) were taught in our "keyboarding" classes to hit - twice to type a hyphen in the WordPerfect word processor. Guess where LLMs learned to type? By reading everything we old people wrote
10 hours ago [-]
hnisfrauds 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 18:12:04 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://hypertalking.com/2023/05/08/1-bit-pixel-art-of-hokus...
08-may-2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866283 72 comments
22-apr-2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47863570 93 comments
With a proper combo o depth you can get a very nice result.
Thanks to your idea, now I am imagining printing different layers of foreground and background on glass and stacking them with spacers for parallax.
Basically I extracted the emojis from my Mac's system font. From there I downscaled them to 64x64 pixels and made them grayscale.
With this set of images I experimented with a few different algorithms. I ended up settling for just a regular ordered dithering (Bayer). But! It still didn't look that good. So what I ended up doing was normalizing the darks and lights for each emoji. This was because some emojis are lighter and darker than others. I wanted to create a uniform appearance for all of them.
So the process was (1) get emojis. (2) downscale + grayscale. (3) normalize tone. (4) dither. (5) then upscale
Not as detailed as these, and using 90/45 degree angles in keeping with the rest of their graphics.
https://developer.rebble.io/guides/app-resources/system-font...
You can implement it in PostScript, and there are many examples (with the PostScript code) in PDF specification (pages 303-307): https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/standards/p...
The site looks like it was abandoned in 2023, however.
I would gladly use this as an emoji set (alongside Chicago or Monaco).