Charlie Harvey

Font of the month: Sans Bullshit Sans

Written by Charlie on

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I realize that posting the Font of the Month on the very last day of the month is cutting it a bit fine. So this month’s font is a bit special. Sans Bullshit Sans, by PixelAmbacht hides bullshit marketing words in your text with a Comic Sans-styled censorship bar.

source-serif typeface

How is it done?

The first question to ask (at least if you are me) is how that could possibly work. The answer, as PixelAmbacht explains in the blog post Sans Bullshit Sans: leveraging the synergy of ligatures is through the power of ligatures.

Ligatures are joins between letters that make text easier to read. Fonts allow you to define ligatures as part of the font, though they are often stripped out online to reduce filesize.

By using a list of bullshit words rather than the normal list of letter pairs as the basis of the ligatures, you can effictively override words in the font.

PixelAmbracht then made SVGs of the word bullshit in various widths and overrode the ligatures in various of the font definition tables. Once that was done and the font recompiled SansBullshitSans was complete. As you can see from the demo below.

Try Sans Bullshit Sans

Can’t think of any bullshit words? Cut and paste anything from IBMs website and you have a good chance of finding some. Alternatively use the list of bullshit words.

Wrapping up

The font itself is based on Droid Sans, a solid sans-serif released under an Apache Licence by Google and most famous for being the one of the default fonts on Android.

I enjoyed SansBullshitSans because it pushes the boundaries of what a font can be. And because it takes the piss. Always a good thing.


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