Brutalita Sans: an Experimental Font and Font Editor

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

fibo

601 points

80 comments

brutalita.comTechstoryHigh profile

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Font DesignTypographyExperimental UI

Key topics

Font Design

Typography

Experimental UI

Brutalita Sans is an experimental font and font editor that has garnered significant attention on HN, with users praising its technical impressiveness and creativity, while also discussing its limitations and potential improvements.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

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01Story posted
Sep 23, 2025 at 9:54 AM EDT
3 months ago
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Sep 25, 2025 at 9:16 AM EDT
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Sep 30, 2025 at 9:26 AM EDT
3 months ago
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Discussion (80 comments)

Showing 80 comments

erremerre

3 months ago

1 reply

An amazing thing, given the author is Spanish speaker I really miss the ñ Ñ. But I guess his answer is going to be, you can make those yourself!

mistercow

3 months ago

2 replies

I tried to do that, and now I’m just confused. The included glyph for the lower case n doesn’t actually fit the grid, so you can’t seem to replicate it. But also that grid doesn’t have enough resolution to do the tilde. Maybe I’m missing something?

dole

3 months ago

2 replies

Enter a N or n into the Editing box, you'll see the two grids that make the glyph up along with a blank third grid on the bottom, add a small tilde in the top two rows. Or copy and paste the actual Ñ or ñ characters into the Editing box to create it new, and you can use it immediately with the alphabet textbox on the left.

cgriswald

3 months ago

The editor doesn’t understand ñ and you can’t make a tilde because it requires a minimum of four points of width.

mistercow

3 months ago

Yes, and those glyphs don’t fit the grid. Try to redraw the n from the original font yourself. You can’t, because you can’t add points between the grid dots.

xg15

3 months ago

1 reply

Yeah, there are some sort of shenanigans going on in the editor. The premade letters use a finer grid than what the editor lets you work with.

It's most obvious with O, {, & and # which are impossible to draw with the grid that's presented to you.

xg15

3 months ago

Noticed that on desktop, the real grid, including the "half points" is shown and you can actually work with it. So it might just be a problem with the mobile version.

giancarlostoro

3 months ago

3 replies

Reminded me a teenie tiny bit of the original font used by Habbo Hotel Volter (Goldfish) which has a rough pixel look to it (at least that's how my nostalgia makes me see it) they got rid of the Volter font when Habbo upgraded from Adobe Shockwave to Adobe Flash, they went to Ubuntu font if I remember correctly. I still miss the old font.

My favorite thing about Habbo's font from back in 2001 is the "emojis" that it had. If you played Habbo back then, you were likely using emojis before they were cool. ;)

That editor is really cool; you can even see the font change live on the left!

https://www.dafont.com/volter-goldfish.font

afandian

3 months ago

1 reply

Also reminiscent of CNC router fonts.

https://webonastick.com/fonts/routed-gothic/

Discussed here a few times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30190397

rbanffy

3 months ago

I had hopes I could find an answer to https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/41048/are-there-an... in this rabbit hole.

Not yet.

cl3misch

3 months ago

1 reply

Thank you for sending me into a Habbo Hotel rabbit hole of nostalgia! They have a classic mode apparently, which is even on Steam now.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3809900/Habbo_Hotel_Origi...

giancarlostoro

3 months ago

1 reply

Yeah, that is recent, they have had Origins out for over a year. Friends of mine were indirectly involved in what lead to Origins being a thing. Someone discovered you can just run Shockwave as a standalone executable. The developer leading the efforts for Origins was also iconic in the Habbo reverse engineering scene, where players would recreate the back-end server. He was known as Myrax back then. ;)

doublerabbit

3 months ago

2 replies

I was one of those scene-kids. Some Java guy joined the IRC channel saw what we had coded, swore bloody mercy and then rewrote it as a lesson to us.

I lost the archive on an old hard-drive however the scene still limps along. C# and Java were the main languages used.

https://forum.ragezone.com/community/habbo-hotel.282/

giancarlostoro

3 months ago

As for that IRC... was it Totov? or... and I don't recall if Jordan had one with Habbo stuff or not...

Java makes it sound like you're talking about Totov where Blunk was born by Nillus and Office.Boy after Nillus coding up two or three C# based emulators.

giancarlostoro

3 months ago

;) you are forgetting VB6

fanf2

3 months ago

Reminds me of Teletext, the BBC Micro’s mode 7, and Bedstead https://bjh21.me.uk/bedstead/

afandian

3 months ago

4 replies

How do you edit different letters? When I opened it, 'Q' is selected but I don't see buttons to change letter?

tspng

3 months ago

1 reply

The letter below the "Editing" label is an input field. You can change the current letter there.

afandian

3 months ago

Thanks, got it! There's no clue that it's editable.

adamddev1

3 months ago

Yes this threw me off when I first opened it. When you select the letter field you see a flashing cursor but you can't erase the character and type a new one. Instead you have to type a new character which overwrites the old "editing" character. This is confusing because it's not the behavior that the user expects when they see a flashing cursor in a text input.

I would suggest allowing people to erase the letter and type a new one in the editing field.

Once I figured out this little UI hiccup I found it absolutely delightful to play with this. What a fascinating experiment in making a font immediately editable, like a mini font-REPL. I've often been interested in (but never dabbled in) creating or editing fonts. This made that itch immediately scratchable in a raw, primitive way that unlocked something interesting in my brain.

This is a great example of what art can do.

hedora

3 months ago

Type the letter you want in the left box.

linguistics__

3 months ago

Where you see the 'Q', it's a text-field, you can just enter a different letter and it'll switch.

bapak

3 months ago

1 reply

Cool but pretty bad edit UI. Can't figure out how to edit an existing letter without starting from scratch. One letter at a time. What are even the additional grids below the letter being edited?

afandian

3 months ago

I like the UI, as more of a thing-to-play-with than a serious typographic tool. Each grid contains a continuous polyline.

thedumbname

3 months ago

2 replies

How to split line? Not clear how to draw character with accents, for example

thw_9a83c

3 months ago

1 reply

> How to split line?

Each (poly) line has a separate layer. Preview '#' character to get an idea. A new layer is created every time you fill the previous one.

thedumbname

3 months ago

Got it, thanks

oniony

3 months ago

Each box is a layer. So you put the accent in the second box.

lelanthran

3 months ago

1 reply

This needs more upvotes. Hopefully the author reads this comment and provides a hint on how to create extra grids (accidentally deleted one, now I only have 2)

KwanEsq

3 months ago

So far as I can tell an extra blank grid appears as soon as the previous blank one has content/pre-existing default grid is edited.

evertedsphere

3 months ago

2 replies

this read to me like brutalità (which would be "brutality" in italian but i don't know if it is actually a word in use) first

lentil_soup

3 months ago

1 reply

close enough, but it's in spanish. Form the website:

"The name means "little brutal" in Spanish."

so the emphasis is on the 'i'

evertedsphere

3 months ago

yes, hence the "first" (before i saw the note)

jortis

3 months ago

Yes, is a word in use.

Brutalità is brutality in english.

thw_9a83c

3 months ago

1 reply

It's very nice and interesting, but the font editor is... brutal.

There is no way to undo, redo, or move the anchor points. At least you can delete the last line segment by clicking on the last point.

DannyPage

3 months ago

It would also help to indicate which dot is starting point and which is the ending point.

rebolek

3 months ago

1 reply

This is amazing!

Reminds when I was doing my own bitmap fonts on ZX Spectrum and Amiga. They were probably very ugly by today's standards but they were mine :) I guess I'll create one for my terminal, it probably won't be used there for too long but it would remind me of times when I was more in control of my machine.

JdeBP

3 months ago

One does not need a WWW-based editor to make that kind of font, if you're going to give it a go. A text editor and Viznut's perl scripts yields BDF files quite straightforwardly.

* https://github.com/jdebp/unscii/blob/2.1.1f/src/font-topaz.t...

* https://github.com/jdebp/unscii/blob/2.1.1f/src/font-spectru...

asddubs

3 months ago

1 reply

I would suggest drag to move dots

sionisrecur

3 months ago

Same, I love the idea but the editor needs a bit of work. Moving dots, deleting dots and dragging to create new lines would be nice.

On the other hand I do like that it is low resolution so one is limited from trying to add lots of details.

pyrale

3 months ago

1 reply

Hate the font, love the editor.

edit: tried to type "à", and the letter is not recognized in the font (appears in red in the editor).

Would there be a way to tell the editor that "à" = "a" + "`", rather than retyping the symbol from scratch?

edit2 : Having to remove all the [2..n] points if you want to change the second point you made is also a bit of a pain, especially for people like me with little experience of where the points end up being on the line vertically.

dheera

3 months ago

3 replies

I want to create a GenAI fork of this where you do one character and it tries to mimic the style for all of the others.

citizenpaul

3 months ago

1 reply

I think that would be really difficult to pull off in a way that generates usable fonts. A huge part of fonts is subjective human perception of them.

It would be cool for marketing style fonts though.

rc1

3 months ago

Looking at the link and the editor, it seems like a feasible fork.

niccl

3 months ago

1 reply

Douglas Hofstadter went there with his Letter Spirit project/concept/something. I can't find a decent single link about it, but there seems to have been an HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37754559

Vivtek

3 months ago

Gary McGraw was the first doctoral candidate to work on the Letter Spirit project:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220331021500/http://goosie.cog...

And John Rehling did a second portion in his doctoral work:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150320160815/https://www.cogsc...

(Thanks for this complaint - I hadn't realized that Rehling's thesis was linked from the Waybacked version of his personal page, and that finally completes my collection!)

You can also read Chapter 10 in Hofstadter's 1995 book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" for a pretty solid overview.

But yeah, seeing this project immediately reminded me of Letter Spirit, since it's basically a web editor for gridfonts.

nph278

3 months ago

Relevant tom7 project:

http://tom7.org/lowercase/

noduerme

3 months ago

1 reply

To me the magic here is that the font used on the website text updates in realtime when you make changes to any glyph. Anyone know how that's happening, exactly?

javierbyte

3 months ago

2 replies

Hey! For the real-time editor I have an invisible textarea in the background with a monospace font and I'm rendering SVGs on top of it, each character is a React component.

well_actulily

3 months ago

With heavy use of SVG <symbol>, one would hope!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Reference/E...

noduerme

3 months ago

Sorry, I have only browsed this on my phone and haven't looked at the structure at all..I mean the whole text of the page that says "Brutalita is an experimental font..."

I can select the text from this and copy it. When you say that the text area is invisible... you mean it's not display:none or hidden... it's the color of the background and still selectable but it's covered with white SVG glyphs? Hah... if that's what I'm understanding it's a very funny trick!

javierbyte

3 months ago

2 replies

Author here! I'm so happy to see Brutalita randomly popping up on Hacker News!

I had fun building this small project, there are a few fun things I did to make this work:

- The editor is a textarea with a monospace font, but the text is transparent, the font is rendered on top of it using SVG of the same size and line height as the monospace font behind it. This way I didn't have to recreate a whole editor and got the real-time preview I wanted.

- The way the SVG preview and the 'real font' are constructed is different. I talk about this a bit more on my blog [1] but in short in SVG I can use "thick lines" with rounded corners, and for the font I have to render polygons and I found a great library "mfogel/polygon-clipping" that makes the process of combining them a breeze.

Thank you all for the interest! I might work on an update or two ;)

[1] https://javier.xyz/blog/brutalita-learning-opentypejs

nine_k

3 months ago

1 reply

The editor does not seem to allow to move nodes, nor does it allow to delete a node, or at least to delete the last node of a chain. This makes the editing process more like a puzzle + skill game. One wrong click, and you have to redo from start. Or put every segment on a separate map, and be good at mentally combining them.

But well, it is an addictive game! :)

aussietechguru

3 months ago

If you click on the last node again, it deletes it

m-p-3

3 months ago

Do you accept PR to include some accented characters, or do you prefer keeping a limited set or characters?

adw

3 months ago

Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29921137

browningstreet

3 months ago

Oblig

https://fontstruct.com/

xg15

3 months ago

The editor and generation scheme is really cool.

I'd like more info on the possible "operations" that form the font glyph though. First I thought it was all just choosing dots on the 3x5 grid and connecting them with lines, but there also seem to be "half-strokes" (lowercase i) and "rounded corners" that don't align with the dots (used for almost all "round" letters like O, C etc). Especially the latter seem to be crucial if you don't want all the round segment to look like diamonds.

So how do I do those things in the editor and are there even more of them?

Edit: Or is it really just 5x9 instead of 3x5 with only every second grid point visible? Lowercase "f" looks like that.

Also, it's kind of obvious you can't draw a "#" sign on a 3x5 grid...

bmn__

3 months ago

The grid is too narrow. :( With just five pixels, I can't make a decent looking ß and ẞ that are sufficiently distinct from each other.

jortis

3 months ago

Very nice font.

In italian "Brutalita" (but with an accent on the last a: "Brutalità") it means brutality.

lagniappe

3 months ago

Lots of complaining in here about something that's really well made.

zeeqeen

3 months ago

The font has bad support for CJK fonts (take Chinese for example).

en: Hello, World! zh: 你好，世界！

You can copy that in their font editor to give it a try.

timontsiolis

3 months ago

Very inspiring... Makes me wanna dive into fonts again...

hyperpl

3 months ago

Will need to try this in a terminal but on initial glance it looks similar to terminus (a font I've been trying to find a replacement for for over 20 years....)

rbanffy

3 months ago

Reminds me of how the fonts are defined in the IBM 2250 and the CDC 6x00 console.

sixthDot

3 months ago

little UX issue: that's a little surprising that knots cannot be moved.

doright

3 months ago

Reminds me of Metafont by Donald Knuth.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont

GnarfGnarf

3 months ago

I appreciate how lower-case ‘L’, digit ‘1’ and upper-case ‘I’ are differentiated. Also alpha ‘O’ and zero.

ChrisNorstrom

3 months ago

Hi, Thank you so much for this. Brutalita is PERFECT, I edited the BGRP letters and will be using it for a new game I'm working on. I was just looking for something like this, kinda futuristic but minimal and simple. I love it.

limbero

3 months ago

Wow, this is both really fun and very technically impressive!

sebastianconcpt

3 months ago

I viscerally despise brutalism in whatever it tries to influence.

sunrunner

3 months ago

Glyph editing makes me feel like I’m doing Marching Squares.

noreplydev

3 months ago

from spain?

jappwilson

3 months ago

very cool idea for the editor. I remember having to add an entire sprite sheet for fonts. I wonder if it can generate a sprite sheet for generated fonts

wordglyph

3 months ago

This would have come in handy when I built https://WordGlyph.xyz a word game based on building a letter font

sshine

3 months ago

Very cool.

Computer0

3 months ago

Cool idea, it was a bit painful for me though. The UX was frustrating, and I only served to make the font worse lol

nickdothutton

3 months ago

A little reminiscent of modernist Italian fonts seen on war memorials.

dvsfish

3 months ago

Wow this is so cool! Love a nifty but well executed little project. Editor especially is wonderful.

olivia-banks

3 months ago

Font showcase websites are frequently some of my favorites from a design perspective. This stuff just looks awesome.

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