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 15 hours 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 15 hours 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 13 hours ago [-]
They look good what was your process.
willmeyers 8 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 12 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.
She was the one to do the original icons for the Macintosh
SpyCoder77 9 hours ago [-]
On mobile if you zoom in the background gives you a headache
semolino 8 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.
StacyC 14 hours ago [-]
Love the website, fonts, UI and all of it! It brings back fun memories of my early Mac days.
mrhottakes 16 hours ago [-]
This has me feeling nostalgic for Hypercard. Nice work!
SpyCoder77 9 hours ago [-]
The rendering on this blank character is wrong, it is visible
kristianp 5 hours ago [-]
The little crosses around the em-dashes? If I comment out the BitGeneva12 font in the css body they go away.
krupan 10 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!!
trollbridge 16 hours ago [-]
Some things are just plain beautiful.
I would gladly use this as an emoji set (alongside Chicago or Monaco).
mathgladiator 15 hours 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!
andsoitis 16 hours ago [-]
Cool. 1-bit hi-resolution emoji would be fire.
socalgal2 14 hours ago [-]
What resolution? high enough and they will just appear gray scale. I think the point is for them to be low-res
mrpeek 11 hours ago [-]
Nice! I want a phone theme with this. Do you know any?
guff_se 13 hours ago [-]
There’s an awful lot of emdashes in that text.
dbalatero 10 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 10 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
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).