Bastardica - Mix and distort fonts into cursed OpenType creations
Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard
Bastardica is a browser-based foundry for creating 'bastard' web fonts by mixing, stretching, and squishing glyphs from different typefaces. Upload your base and mix-in fonts, then apply effects like scaling, offsetting, and skewing. The tool runs entirely locally using Pyodide and fontTools, so your fonts never leave your computer. The output is a standard OpenType font with ligature substitutions, making it compatible with browsers, design tools, and print. Inspired by Times New Bastard, Bastardica lets you generate unique, cursed typography for any project. Free and open-source, with no licensing restrictions beyond those of the original fonts.
Bastardica can make simple fonts feel a little, hmm, richer?
- ycombiredd
So at first I misunderstood your tool, thinking it was like a tool I made a little over a year ago that creates new fonts from existing font glyph paths, combining them in a couple of ways. It began as an ambigram generator (png image) using an arbitrary ttf or woff of your choosing and once I had that working, I realized that since I was just transforming vector paths, I could mix paths from multiple fonts, still focusing on ambigram generation.
Eventually, scope crept until it became an interesting and useful thing to be able to combine say, the top half of Arial with the bottom half of Times New Roman's letters (and combine with various boolean operations on the paths, with outlines, etc, and I assumed others would be as pleased with this ability as I was, so I documented some examples and shared it here and in a fontography subreddit.
To my surprise, it got essentially no interest when I posted here, and the response from the typography folks was basically negative with people somehow framing it as a piracy-adjacent thing, and not a fun thing to do, just mashing up vector paths to get interesting unique results. shrug
Seems like you and maybe some other participants in this discussion might actually appreciate this little tool and get some enjoyment and perhaps utility out of it, so I'll share it here.
https://github.com/scottvr/fambigen
There are examples in the README that show what it does in ambigram mode or "font compositor" mode. Enjoy!
- mortenjorck
I have never felt quite so cacklingly nefarious as a designer as I did just now carefully adjusting vertical scale and offset so that the x-height and baseline of Papyrus optically match Comic Sans when mixed together.
I don't yet know who I'll be pranking with the downloaded font, but I look forward to their reaction.
- krelas
If you want to make a designer have a nervous breakdown, upload a copy of Helvetica and make every second or third character be Arial.
- dspillett
To either heighten or smooth out the effect, you could use ligature support. Perhaps for double-letters (like the tt in letter) only change one of the pair.
Heck, while you are messing around with ligatures you could be really evil and use them to introduce typos, or unwanted corrections (color→colour)…
- Fliwatt
There is a lot of fun stuff you can do with fonts. A friend of mine made a self-censoring font: Paranoia Sans https://github.com/flegfleg/Paranoia-Sans
- Sharlin
Inspired by the sample text for "Nervous Sans": "Anal", an Arial with bad keming
- tholman
Fun story, a good... (checks calendar, oh lord) 8+ years ago, I made a mis-kerned version of helvetica (smelvetica i called it [1]) as a joke, and eventually had the lawyers push on me
> we ask that you stop promoting ‘Smelvetica’ and making the font software available to everybody. Next time, just let us know if you have more ideas on how to modernize our classics, we are always open for creative input.
- altairprime
Temu Sans is an absolutely beautiful demo choice. I love this. Thank you for making it.