1-Bit Hokusai’s ”The Great Wave” (opens in new tab)

> The author really nailed the pixel perfect fonts — it looks perfect on my low-DPI and high-DPI displays.

It has some weird rainbow effect to it on mine, and the background flickers when I scroll.

The website is really good but the font is blurry on my windows machine, only in this blog post.

If I adblock the (beautiful) “Great Wave” image, the font reads perfectly.

How I miss Escape Velocity and Ambrosia Software. It was the first game I bought. Had to call the US at some weird hour from Australia and pay with Dad's credit card over the phone.

I'm aware there are similar games like Endless Sky (which I've played quite a bit).

I really wish the people behind Ambrosia could be encouraged to open source everything.

It's beautiful, but unfortunate that the font is trying to use cleartype, which screws up the aesthetic bigly.

It's probably due to anti-aliasing. A similar thing happens on some versions of Windows with ClearType turned on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearType

I assumed this was intentional to sorta look weird and retro. Sorta wild it's just Firefox messing it up.

Sub pixel antialiasing gone wrong?

On your screenshot I can only see the fonts aren't quite sharp, the rainbow effect is probably from your display trying to render these subpixel differences.

Looks fine in firefox on Linux: https://imgur.com/lmxTyrt.png

I wish I could run my entire display in retro dithering mode.

My own sense is that black and white forced an economy of pixels. For glyphs, icons, artwork, I could labor over the placement of every single pixel.

A crisp, high contrast display and neat, little square pixels just reinforces that kind of regenerative feedback loop.

Yes. For me, part of it is the display tech in use. Those monochrome CRT displays look great! And that "white" phosphor helps augment the whole thing in a way an LCD misses the mark on, but just slightly.

Still looks great.

For what it is worth, an e-ink display will look fantastic! I have one and will view this eye candy on it soon enough.

The author says “Software-wise I use Aldus SuperPaint 3.0”, so I expect it was drawn 100% by hand.

It's a woodblock print — there were thousands printed, and ~100 known to still exist. I've seen the British Museum's copy.

I saw an original copy yesterday in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, along with the 50,000 piece LEGO version! They have a large exhibit about Hokusai, along with many of his contemporaries such as Hiroshige, works from his students and teachers, and many many examples of how the Great Wave has been reflected in art and culture over the years. They didn't have this beautiful little 1-bit piece though.

It must have been a thrill to see a PowerBook 100!

I thought he made and sold many prints of each piece, so that identifying the original one wouldn't really be possible.

Is it worth reading? :)

Hokusai (1760 - 1849) also did tentacle porn

NSFW art -

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%2...

Book -https://pulverer.si.edu/node/277/title

Generally, "n bit" describes the color depth of an image by the number of bits used to store the color information of a pixel.

Some common formats:

  1 bit .... b/w  (foreground or background color set per pixel)
  4 bit .... 16 colors (indexed color palette or 16 shades of grey in 1 channel)
  8 bit .... 256 colors (indexed color palette or 1-channel greyscale image)
  12 bit ... 16 x 16 x 16 colors, 3 color channels at 4 bits for 4,096 colors total
  24 bit ... 256 x 256 x 256 colors, 3 color channels at 8 bits for 16,777,216 colors total
  32 bit ... as above, but including an extra alpha channel (mask) for 256 levels of transparency

There are also high-resolution color modes (e.g. in Photoshop) using either 16 bits or even 32 bits per color channel. (So 8-bit, 16-bit or 32-bit may also describe the depth for each individual color channel in imaging software.)

"8-bit" is also used for graphics on 8-bit computers, most often a palette of 8 or 16 indexed colors in some sort of sub-palette (e.g., 2 bit = 4 out of 8 or 16 colors), in rare cases even 128 colors (like on the Atari 2600). Here, "8-bit" relates to the platform and not to image depth or a specific implementation.

Every pixel has 1 bit of color depth, basically black or white.

2 colors per pixel - black or white.

If you transmitted it one pixel at a time left to right top to bottom scan, or boudestrophon l r l r l r if you prefer then the pixel stream would equal a 1 bit value toggling on or off.

The property that a good font should have: on or off, present or not present.

Thanks! :-)

You’re going to miss the pixel perfect lines. There’s a whole subtle esthetic in this version from the careful manipulation of pixels…

"Return of the Obra Dinn" game gives similar vibes.

Holy dogcow, even!