alt.hn

6/25/2026 at 1:15:18 PM

1-Bit Pixel Art Emojis

 https://hypertalking.com/2023/05/15/1-bit-pixel-art-emojis/

by surprisetalk

7/1/2026 at 4:24:45 PM

My favorite from his site

https://hypertalking.com/2023/05/08/1-bit-pixel-art-of-hokus...

by srean

7/1/2026 at 4:31:44 PM

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.

by justsomehnguy

7/1/2026 at 4:34:29 PM

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.

by srean

7/1/2026 at 5:17:56 PM

I was inspired by this site to run emojis through a dithering algorithm (https://dither-emojis.pages.dev/)! Nothing beats hand drawn though.

by willmeyers

7/1/2026 at 6:55:58 PM

They look good what was your process.

by andrewstuart

7/2/2026 at 12:07:04 AM

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

by willmeyers

7/1/2026 at 8:08:32 PM

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.

https://developer.rebble.io/guides/app-resources/system-font...

by wlesieutre

7/2/2026 at 10:32:59 AM

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.

by ayaros

7/1/2026 at 5:24:30 PM

Great time to shoutout the work of Susan Kare: https://kareprints.com/

by 716dpl

7/1/2026 at 11:25:56 PM

She was the one to do the original icons for the Macintosh

by SpyCoder77

7/1/2026 at 6:32:44 PM

Love the website, fonts, UI and all of it! It brings back fun memories of my early Mac days.

by StacyC

7/1/2026 at 11:25:28 PM

On mobile if you zoom in the background gives you a headache

by SpyCoder77

7/1/2026 at 11:39:22 PM

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.

by semolino

7/1/2026 at 4:20:38 PM

This has me feeling nostalgic for Hypercard. Nice work!

by mrhottakes

7/1/2026 at 3:41:54 PM

Cool. 1-bit hi-resolution emoji would be fire.

by andsoitis

7/1/2026 at 5:35:21 PM

What resolution? high enough and they will just appear gray scale. I think the point is for them to be low-res

by socalgal2

7/1/2026 at 11:30:56 PM

The rendering on this blank character is wrong, it is visible

by SpyCoder77

7/2/2026 at 3:16:41 AM

The little crosses around the em-dashes? If I comment out the BitGeneva12 font in the css body they go away.

by kristianp

7/1/2026 at 3:58:12 PM

Some things are just plain beautiful.

I would gladly use this as an emoji set (alongside Chicago or Monaco).

by trollbridge

7/1/2026 at 4:56:32 PM

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!

by mathgladiator

7/1/2026 at 9:27:55 PM

Nice! I want a phone theme with this. Do you know any?

by mrpeek

7/1/2026 at 10:06:26 PM

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!!

by krupan

7/2/2026 at 7:11:48 AM

Another idea would be to make emojis that could be used as Amiga Workbench 1.3 icons. The Blue, white, orange and black kind.

by bni

7/1/2026 at 6:50:38 PM

There’s an awful lot of emdashes in that text.

by guff_se

7/1/2026 at 9:48:58 PM

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?

by dbalatero

7/1/2026 at 10:11:22 PM

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

by krupan

7/1/2026 at 4:43:55 PM

[dead]

by hnisfrauds