I spent a little more time tweaking my desktop until I arrived at this. Although at a glance it might look pretty similar to before, I made a number of small changes to make my desktop say what I want it to say.
Once again, I excised anti-aliasing, without which
Tahoma actually looks really good. I’m using the
Infinality freetype patches which creates a number of sane defaults, some of which are modeled after other operating systems. I’m using the “Infinality” setting here. At the same time, the renderer anti-aliases fonts in Chrome which somehow makes the experience less distracting for me¹.
I also attached a customized, tiling version of the Mac OS 9 background and switched all my monospace fonts to
Monaco 9 to create a vaguely-late-90s user-experience with an intentional postmodern identity crisis. My terminal, while sporting Monaco, enforces this through its classic Windows terminal color scheme.
What I really want is people to look at my computer and be like, “
What the fuck are you running?”
For IRC, I used to use
Verdana, a font that served me well but with cleaner bitmap glyphs, I opted for
Times New Roman to recreate the feel of late 90s web comics made in MS Paint without resorting to (a “surprisingly” agreeable but ultimately ill-suited)
Comic Sans².
In a world of increasingly seamless interfaces, where are the interfaces that function yet remind us that we’re looking at a box of silicone and plastic? When will UI design have enough interactive tropes that people can create deconstructive self-aware UIs?
I think I’ve reached a relatively stable point³, but I am looking to switch the wallpaper for a Mac OS 8 one if I can find it. If anyone has it handy, I’d greatly appreciate it. Also, I want Linux-compatible versions of Mac OS 8/9 cursors.
¹ A huge problem I had with anti-aliasing off before was the fonts looked really really bad in webpages. This is because not every font has bitmap outlines. To fix this, I made sure to use exclusively fonts from the era I was replicating.
² Trebuchet MS was another candidate but its irregular glyphs eventually became too distracting. Speaking of which, this is one font you hardly ever see anymore. Thank goodness.
³ The Windows 95-inspired one seemed to last almost over two weeks somehow.
____________________
Sofi posts are handcrafted in Seattle, Washington. Each one-of-a-kind post begins with a vision or dream and is the result of hours of research, drafting and revision.