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Buttered Crumpet, a custom typeface for Wallace and Gromit

180 points5 hoursjamieclarketype.com
rda24 hours ago

It’s cute, and I’m trusting enough to believe them when it says 100% home made, but square images with a strong yellow tint will forever be associated with ChatGPT 4o image generation in my mind. Unfortunately, this might become something like the em-dash—where artists start tweaking their work to look less like the AI’s that are copying them.

presbyterian3 hours ago

The cheese pattern and the green teacup pattern after it are obviously AI generated. The weird curve of the wedges, the fuzzy edges to the cheese holes, the artifacting around the edges of the teacups, the fact that neither is a perfectly repeating pattern. It's 100% AI, even if the font may not be.

parpfish3 hours ago

In 15 years, the youths will become obsessed with that strange yellow cartoon style. They will crave that “vintage ChatGPT aesthetic”.

mbo2 hours ago

I've seen nostalgia expressed for the CLIP guided diffusion aesthetic of 2021!

trial32 hours ago

yeah, in the same way we all revisit our studio ghibli family photos from time to time

rustystump1 hour ago

My back breaks in cringe anytime i see an ai ghibli picture. It is an instant negative for me.

henrebotha1 hour ago

> this might become something like the em-dash—where artists start tweaking their work to look less like the AI’s that are copying them.

Literally how art has always worked

IAmBroom39 minutes ago

... right up until July 9, 1962, when one Mr. Andrew Warhola upset the tradition.

And pretty much ever since, too.

hamburglar4 hours ago

Is it intentional that the baseline vertical offset doesn’t seem consistent? Text set in this has a sort of up-and-down sloppy effect. Otherwise I love it.

Edit: it mostly seems that capitals appear higher than lowercase. It feels like there’s more inconsistency though, like the designer didn’t pay attention to eg the perceived “bottom” of curved characters vs flat-bottom ones.

inanutshellus3 hours ago

IMO for a cartoon like W&G a little wonkiness and skew is entirely on-point.

fwip42 minutes ago

Doesn't seem like a ton of attention has been paid to kerning, either. The 'he' pair seems especially noticeable to me, which occurs several times in the "somewhere where there's cheese" image. I don't know enough about font design to guess whether the 'bad' kerning is intentional for the typeface, though - so I could be off base.

crazygringo1 hour ago

It seems intentionally cartoonishly irregular.

stronglikedan4 hours ago

I was just coming here to say, it looks like each letter is about to fall over backwards.

afavour4 hours ago

Really feel like this ought to have been named Wensleydale.

(this is awesome)

Night_Thastus4 hours ago

EDIT: I'm wrong

Jarmsy4 hours ago

Wensleydale is a place in Yorkshire, and a style of cheese, not specific to any one brand, so you could.

4ndrewl4 hours ago

I'm not sure it's a brand name so much as a type of cheese.

shermantanktop3 hours ago

"It's cheese, Gromit!"

xnorswap4 hours ago

Was the crumpet buttered with "I can't believe it's not butter"?

( The typeface looks a lot like https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/i-cant-believe-i... )

undecisive4 hours ago

It's interesting; I'd imagine very similar design briefs (friendliness, breadliness, etc)

The ICBINB font is almost a semi-serif, almost like a sans serif that's slightly melted, whereas I'd say the crumpet is fully serif. The "e", "L" and "v" are pretty different. And I'd say the ICBINB font lends itself better to tighter spaces, whereas the crumpet font seems to beg for more space.

But certainly, I could see one being used to replace another in a pinch - but I'm not a font specialist (graphologist? Is there a word for a person who studies fonts?)

quotemstr4 hours ago

Yeah. It's convergent evolution towards bouba-ness. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect)

pverheggen4 hours ago

Nice find! That looks like Cooper Black, which the article cites as inspiration.

danesparza4 hours ago

Ah, a British convergence! That phrase always makes me think of this now (from the Vicar of Dibley): https://youtu.be/37ficiqoE6U

RIP Emma Chambers

shoelessone4 hours ago

There are a lot of similarities. You must either have a great memory for fonts, or eat a lot of butter alternative spread, either way good eye!

chihuahua36 minutes ago

It's halfway between Comic Sans and the 1970s "Groovy" font.

bloomingeek3 hours ago

I watched S1,Ep2 yesterday. When Wallace took down a picture of a pink pig to open the wall safe and then took out a pink piggy bank, I almost lost it. Classic!

ordu3 hours ago

When I look at the text on the whole it seems that individual characters are not aligned properly, or maybe not vertical enough, or something like this. But when I look at individual characters to confirm it, I don't see any misalignment. How does it work?

kraftman3 hours ago

Yeah they looked like they were wobbling while I read them until I focused on them more.

imnes4 hours ago

Is there a nerdfont variant?

barcodehorse3 hours ago

There's a miniscule dent on the top of the capital B that's really bothering me. Idk, I know everyone's a critic, but it just doesnt sit right with me

shermantanktop3 hours ago

I clearly don't have refined appreciation of visual typographic nuance because I do not see this at all.

shrikant4 hours ago

That's beautiful, I'd love a monospaced variant of this to replace Comic Mono in my IDE/Fira Mono in my terminal. IANA font expert though, would that even be possible?

zabzonk3 hours ago

Shouldn't there be some holes?

k_kiki2 hours ago

It's quite round and looks pretty good.

cush4 hours ago

Fonts are such an underappreciated art form. Love this

quotemstr4 hours ago

Too few people appreciate typefaces. Are they under-overall though? Those who do appreciate get really, really, really into them. I'm sure it nets out. :-)

Apocryphon3 hours ago

I feel like hipster typography is as much an intrinsic part of 2010s design culture as cafes that look like farmhouses, or startups named after common nouns. Saturday Night Live made a sketch about Papyrus nearly ten years ago:

https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/how-ryan-goslings-papyrus-becam...

unicorn_cowboy4 hours ago

Very cute and charming!

maximgeorge4 hours ago

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