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Sans Bullshit Sans

sansbullshitsans.com

370 points by nvie81 · 99 comments

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46 threads
bshimmin

I was disappointed it didn't censor "Meticulously hand crafted" or "Made with love in San Francisco". Otherwise, rather lovely.

pixelambacht

If you like to know about what goes into creating a font like this, check my post about it: http://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/

It's mostly command line tools, so don't worry about any artistic ability (I didn't).

  • mark-r

    Why so careful to choose Droid Sans for the main font, then use Comic Sans for the substitutions? Isn't Comic Sans the property of the most lawyered-up tech company on the planet?

    • pixelambacht

      The difference is that I used Comic Sans in the "design" of my censorship bars — I didn't redistribute the Comic Sans font itself.

dojomouse

I love it, but it let this go completely uncensored:

"This transformative change in paradigm allows us to move beyond conventional thinking and kickstart the data driven era."

Gonna go ahead and flag that as a bug :-)

  • pixelambacht

    Good catch. I'll put the font on Github tonight. Create a ticket (er even better, a pull request), and we'll add that bullshit!

SeanLuke

Needs work. Only about 10% of the relevant terms in Weird Al Yancovic's "Mission Statement" were marked out.

http://lyrics.wikia.com/%22Weird_Al%22_Yankovic:Mission_Stat...

TeMPOraL

Please add one exception - "Cloud" should be turned into "Butt", not bullshit. That's what the laws of the Internet say.

Otherwise, amazing work!

  • thebouv

    Github is hosted in the butt, so I agree with your suggestion. I'll make a bullshit pull request and upload it to the butt soon.

davegardner

Does anyone know how well search engines cope with ligatures? If they don't I expect it won't be long before we see spam sites using ligatures as a way to hide their spamminess.

  • jerluc

    Ligatures shouldn't affect search engines, as they will index the text of the pages, not the fonts/visual representation themselves.

    • derefr

      I assume the problem would be the other way 'round: text that says one thing to search engines, but then uses a custom ligatured font to say something entirely different to users.

    • michaelmcmillan

      I actually think the crawlers are more sophisticated than that. Recently I got an email from Google saying the text on my website was not big enough when browsing my site with a low resolution - which is why they choose to lower my rank on the results page. Clearly they have pretty advanced tests when it comes to accessibility of text, not only the content.

fit2rule

I love ligatures - to me they're like the user interface paradigm of the future, and a good example of the beauty of ligatures is the Chartwell font [1] which allows the creation of beautiful, detailed graphs with little much more than a text editor.

[1] https://www.fontfont.com/how-to-use-ff-chartwell

I'd love to see more innovation in the use of ligatures in user interface and graphics work - so I'm quite happy to learn of Sans Bullshit Sans. Hopefully this will prompt the investigation of ligatures, in general, by more designers .. and we can see other uses come out of this often-overlooked feature.

qznc

There are more fun replacements than versions of "bullshit".

    the agile unicorn funded an uber immersive beta below the fold.

    the [bunk] [hogwash] [stultified] an [oafish] [foolish] [foolery] [in sheer madness]
Tricky: Make sure "a" vs "an" is still used correctly with replacements.
geoah

Bullshit-ify bookmarklet. Create a bookmark with the following code as the url and click it on any website. :)

https://gist.github.com/geoah/b2eda5b6cb7169bbbadb

ps. Chrome seems to be removing the `javascript:` part when pasting the code.

XYEaQMZJvS

I've actually read corporate "mission statements" that don't even sound like English. Like, not just a few buzzwords, but near-complete gibberish in places. What possesses people to do this?

  • tormeh

    The goal is to write something that people can rally behind but that's at the same time not divisive. So it needs emotional impact without meaning, and thus we get corporate bullshit.

  • cheez

    People are generally too nice to call out bullshit. When things don't make sense, you give others the benefit of the doubt and think "well, it must make sense to them" rather than "hey, what does that mean exactly?"

  • sinaa

    They might have been using this: http://cbsg.sf.net

  • andrewfong

    Mission statement by committee?

PhasmaFelis

I'd like the see a version that replaces "the Cloud" with "the internet" and "in the Cloud" with "on the internet." The meaning is 100% unchanged--try it!

arihant

Nothing happened for "It's a 5 billion dollar market and we need only 1% of it."

I think they should work on incorporating phrases too. Regardless, this is insanely great.

  • WhitneyLand

    I like your observation, but technically would this fall under bullshit or delusion?

    I guess it's a matter of definition. Does bullshit require intentionally trying to bullshit someone, or is it sufficient to speak bullshit even if you actually believe what you are saying?

wingerlang

It would be fun if the sentence "Meticulously hand crafted by PixelAmbacht" had some of the ligatures. I expected it to have but it didn't.

vanderZwan

Can you make one for art bullshit too? Like: "This eclectic multi-layered work represents the stratification of society and holds a mirror in front of us, confronting the viewer with the tensions between individual desire and societal pressures to conform"

cfstras

For even more fun, install the font and put the following in your user stylesheet:

  * {
    font-family: 'Sans Bullshit Sans', cursive !important;
    text-rendering: optimizeLegibility !important;
  }
rl3

What better way to put this font through its paces than the classic Web Economy Bullshit Generator:

http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html

OzzyB

And here I was thinking I was the only one who noticed this :)

Now all we need is something to "bullshitize" all those scroll-down parallax websites with a nice duotone-fullscreen-photo-at-the-top...

lukeholder

haha, favourite part is the logo satire at the bottom of the page.

seanhandley

Not working in Chrome 40

GhotiFish

If you're not willing to make the jump to a font change, you can get Cloud2Butt for firefox or chrome and it will help a little.

lordelph

The more interesting part for me was how they made it http://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/

TL;DR version: they made a font with custom ligatures, so that the sequence of glyphs that make 'synergy' are replaced with a single 'bullshit' glyph!

qnaal

I didn't see anything in the spec[1] about case insensitivity- but as long as the table is being generated programmatically, covering capitalized forms could be in order.

[1]http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/gsub.htm

  • MayanAstronaut

    True. The mapping should be in github so people could add all case variations within reason.

    I'd personally add (unicorn pivot|Unicorn pivot)--> "Stinking just made BS" on to it.

jermo

What would be great is to be able to pass the text as a URL parameter or save the text in bsFiddle. Something like:

http://www.sansbullshitsans.com?bs1234

That would make it easier to share my bullshit on social media and align strategies with product synergy.

phaemon

My invented mission statement made it through unaltered.

"We reinterpret the existing synergistic environment to create an overarching fluidity that will encompass both the paradoxical business lexicon and the mainstream black swansong."

I hope I haven't inadvertently created some new buzzphrasing..

kilian

Beware! If you have droid sans installed, this will overwrite it (make sure to name your fonts!)

geoah

OSX Chrome 40 64bit issue: Pasting text copied from anything that support formatting via html will retain font/size from copied text and thus BS font will not being used. Even Cmd+a and removing the text will retain wrong font.

  • kybernetyk

    That's OS X default behavior for rich text editing controls. You're supposed to us "Paste and Match Style" instead of just "Paste" if you don't want to retain the original formatting attributes.

  • pixelambacht

    Thanks. I think the contenteditable div was to blame. I changed this to a textarea, should fix that problem.

jhou2

"internet of things" gets through the b.s. filter. Kindly fix. Thank you!

  • ygra

    Also synergy is bullshitted, but synergies not.

    • antimagic

      Yup, personally I don't see the point of doing anything if it's only going to give me one synergy...

      • wlesieutre

        The key part of having multiple synergies is that your synergies can synergize. This makes synergistics a critical component of disruptive growth hacking, as your additional synergies will scale up non-linearly. That's why at Synrgize we're making the world a better place by constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum synergistic synergization.

Aoyagi

Lovely! Needs a "translator" for sites along with BS counter.

mosselman

All I got it to sensor was 'startup' and 'flow' by pasting in all the titles from HN. So I am pretty proud that I can't come up with such things more naturally :).

RyanMcGreal

Great concept. Improve it by adding the plural and gerund forms of the bullshit jargon words: synergies, leveraging, and so on.

WhitneyLand

I'm going to make a list of everyone who comments on this post as people I may enjoy working with on a future project.

Silhouette

I tried "It's like bullshit bingo but for geeks."

Apparently it is quite happy to be described as such. :-)

qznc

Also https://xkcd.com/1288/

zem

missed 'synergistic' and 'mobile-first', though it did get 'leverage'

grigio

why "cloud" isnt censored?

Gorkys

Any way to automatically apply this to techcrunch.com? I imagine not much would be left.

hessenwolf

I expected it to pick up Big Data. (not that I am against key-value stores)

pgt

Seems to be missing the "digital strategist" ligature :).

cabirum

does not work in IE - "@font-face failed OpenType embedding permission check. Permission must be Installable."

  • pixelambacht

    This should be fixed now. If you download the font again, it should be installable. (If you could check and let me know I'd be eternally grateful! I don't have a Windows machine nearby.)

  • pixelambacht

    Thanks for reporting. I took the webfont version of Open Sans as that was smaller. I'll change the permissions tonight.

benoliver999

The image at the very bottom made me laugh.

jlukanta

I think this is great to test your pitch!

pix64

Caps breaks it.

  • ygra

    That's probably quite tricky to fix as ligatures are case-sentivive. It makes little sense to have an fi ligeture applied to FI, as well. And the longer the letter combination, the more variants you'd have to include (2^length).

    • pdpi

      To be fair, you only need three to cover the vast majority of actual uses: variant, Variant, VARIANT.

drdeca

this falls victim to the scunthorp problem. e.g. the word "fragile" becomes fr<bs>.

  • KhalPanda

    Scunthorpe*. References to that problem always greatly amuse me, I live literally down the road.

stevep98

That purple color is amazing!

lwh

Great now every HN post appears to be the same story.

plg

Can we have one for science please.

novel

innovative

groundbreaking

paradigm shift

etc etc

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