ExpanDrive

A Typophile user named miha has done some amazing pixel art that exploits subpixel antialiasing. In his first post he reworked the YouTube favicon from a pink mess into something that looks sharp and legible.

His second post debuts a draft of a completely legible typeface with an x-height of 3 pixels. The picture above (taken from miha’s comment on the post) shows the word “ipsum dolor” at 16× magnification. The original size text, so small you might not notice it, is in the lower right corner.

Subpixel antialiasing is some magic stuff. As he said in his YouTube post “If you want to be suprised: white text on red is not really white, it is purple & yellow! There is no spoon.” I’d love to see a 9× mockup of what it looks like after antialiasing is applied.

(Mac users can open Digital ColorMeter, in Applications -> Utilities, for a quick way to zoom in on the pixel art.)