Sans Bullshit Sans (opens in new tab)

(sansbullshitsans.com)

370 pointsnvie8111y ago97 comments

97 comments

I was disappointed it didn't censor "Meticulously hand crafted" or "Made with love in San Francisco". Otherwise, rather lovely.

pixelambacht11y ago

Submit a pull request :) https://github.com/RoelN/SansBullshitSans

m_t11y ago

Same with "Disrupt all the things".

raverbashing11y ago

Synergistic wasn't censored in my case (but leverage was)

2 more replies

mojuba11y ago

As well as "revolutionary". Technically "revolutionary" is when something is overthrown. So your product is revolutionary if, and only if you have already put Sony, Samsung, Apple, or whoever else out of business.

WorldWideWayne11y ago

Any use of the word "Gorgeous" should also be bullshitted (esp. when written by the makers/providers of said app).

pixelambacht11y ago

If you like to know about what goes into creating a font like this, check my post about it: http://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/

It's mostly command line tools, so don't worry about any artistic ability (I didn't).

mark-r11y ago

Why so careful to choose Droid Sans for the main font, then use Comic Sans for the substitutions? Isn't Comic Sans the property of the most lawyered-up tech company on the planet?

pixelambacht11y ago

The difference is that I used Comic Sans in the "design" of my censorship bars — I didn't redistribute the Comic Sans font itself.

dojomouse11y ago

I love it, but it let this go completely uncensored:

"This transformative change in paradigm allows us to move beyond conventional thinking and kickstart the data driven era."

Gonna go ahead and flag that as a bug :-)

pixelambacht11y ago

Good catch. I'll put the font on Github tonight. Create a ticket (er even better, a pull request), and we'll add that bullshit!

SeanLuke11y ago

Needs work. Only about 10% of the relevant terms in Weird Al Yancovic's "Mission Statement" were marked out.

http://lyrics.wikia.com/%22Weird_Al%22_Yankovic:Mission_Stat...

TeMPOraL11y ago

Please add one exception - "Cloud" should be turned into "Butt", not bullshit. That's what the laws of the Internet say.

Otherwise, amazing work!

thebouv11y ago

Github is hosted in the butt, so I agree with your suggestion. I'll make a bullshit pull request and upload it to the butt soon.

davegardner11y ago

Does anyone know how well search engines cope with ligatures? If they don't I expect it won't be long before we see spam sites using ligatures as a way to hide their spamminess.

jerluc11y ago

Ligatures shouldn't affect search engines, as they will index the text of the pages, not the fonts/visual representation themselves.

derefr11y ago

I assume the problem would be the other way 'round: text that says one thing to search engines, but then uses a custom ligatured font to say something entirely different to users.

michaelmcmillan11y ago

I actually think the crawlers are more sophisticated than that. Recently I got an email from Google saying the text on my website was not big enough when browsing my site with a low resolution - which is why they choose to lower my rank on the results page. Clearly they have pretty advanced tests when it comes to accessibility of text, not only the content.

fit2rule11y ago

I love ligatures - to me they're like the user interface paradigm of the future, and a good example of the beauty of ligatures is the Chartwell font [1] which allows the creation of beautiful, detailed graphs with little much more than a text editor.

[1] https://www.fontfont.com/how-to-use-ff-chartwell

I'd love to see more innovation in the use of ligatures in user interface and graphics work - so I'm quite happy to learn of Sans Bullshit Sans. Hopefully this will prompt the investigation of ligatures, in general, by more designers .. and we can see other uses come out of this often-overlooked feature.

qznc11y ago

There are more fun replacements than versions of "bullshit".

    the agile unicorn funded an uber immersive beta below the fold.

    the [bunk] [hogwash] [stultified] an [oafish] [foolish] [foolery] [in sheer madness]

Tricky: Make sure "a" vs "an" is still used correctly with replacements.

TazeTSchnitzel11y ago

Replace "an" with "a", assuming "a" will sometimes be pronounced "ey".

geoah11y ago

Bullshit-ify bookmarklet. Create a bookmark with the following code as the url and click it on any website. :)

https://gist.github.com/geoah/b2eda5b6cb7169bbbadb

ps. Chrome seems to be removing the `javascript:` part when pasting the code.

lmm11y ago

Chrome does that to make self-XSS harder.

pixelambacht11y ago

That is awesome! I think Fx and IE might choke on the cross-domain font requestiness though.

bzle11y ago

Yessssss!! This is going to be fun.

XYEaQMZJvS11y ago

I've actually read corporate "mission statements" that don't even sound like English. Like, not just a few buzzwords, but near-complete gibberish in places. What possesses people to do this?

tormeh11y ago

The goal is to write something that people can rally behind but that's at the same time not divisive. So it needs emotional impact without meaning, and thus we get corporate bullshit.

cheez11y ago

People are generally too nice to call out bullshit. When things don't make sense, you give others the benefit of the doubt and think "well, it must make sense to them" rather than "hey, what does that mean exactly?"

sinaa11y ago

They might have been using this: http://cbsg.sf.net

andrewfong11y ago

Mission statement by committee?

PhasmaFelis11y ago

I'd like the see a version that replaces "the Cloud" with "the internet" and "in the Cloud" with "on the internet." The meaning is 100% unchanged--try it!

nemoniac11y ago

Chrome extension that replaces occurrences of 'the cloud' with 'my butt'

https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt

arihant11y ago

Nothing happened for "It's a 5 billion dollar market and we need only 1% of it."

I think they should work on incorporating phrases too. Regardless, this is insanely great.

WhitneyLand11y ago

I like your observation, but technically would this fall under bullshit or delusion?

I guess it's a matter of definition. Does bullshit require intentionally trying to bullshit someone, or is it sufficient to speak bullshit even if you actually believe what you are saying?

wingerlang11y ago

It would be fun if the sentence "Meticulously hand crafted by PixelAmbacht" had some of the ligatures. I expected it to have but it didn't.

vanderZwan11y ago

Can you make one for art bullshit too? Like: "This eclectic multi-layered work represents the stratification of society and holds a mirror in front of us, confronting the viewer with the tensions between individual desire and societal pressures to conform"

zafka11y ago

There is definitely a need for this in the art world. There is actually a bullshit artist statement generator out there that could be grepped for inclusion.

zafka11y ago

http://www.artybollocks.com/

cfstras11y ago

For even more fun, install the font and put the following in your user stylesheet:

  * {
    font-family: 'Sans Bullshit Sans', cursive !important;
    text-rendering: optimizeLegibility !important;
  }

rl311y ago

What better way to put this font through its paces than the classic Web Economy Bullshit Generator:

http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html

OzzyB11y ago

And here I was thinking I was the only one who noticed this :)

Now all we need is something to "bullshitize" all those scroll-down parallax websites with a nice duotone-fullscreen-photo-at-the-top...

lukeholder11y ago

haha, favourite part is the logo satire at the bottom of the page.

seanhandley11y ago

Not working in Chrome 40

MrBuddyCasino11y ago

Definitively not working in Chrome 40 on OSX, but Firefox does. Lovely idea.

fugyk11y ago

It is working on OSX Chrome 40 in my case.

bobbles11y ago

Yeah if i type anything in it just shifts everything down the page

pixelambacht11y ago

I think this was because of the contenteditable div. I now stuck a plain ol' textarea in there, that should fix the problem.

spdustin11y ago

Woah, did I miss something? Chrome has problems with contenteditable?

pbowyer11y ago

Working for me, but only if I type into the textarea (not paste)

sumitviii11y ago

Works if you paste as plain text (Ctrl + Shift + V).

GhotiFish11y ago

If you're not willing to make the jump to a font change, you can get Cloud2Butt for firefox or chrome and it will help a little.

lordelph11y ago

The more interesting part for me was how they made it http://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/

TL;DR version: they made a font with custom ligatures, so that the sequence of glyphs that make 'synergy' are replaced with a single 'bullshit' glyph!

qnaal11y ago

I didn't see anything in the spec[1] about case insensitivity- but as long as the table is being generated programmatically, covering capitalized forms could be in order.

[1]http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/gsub.htm

MayanAstronaut11y ago

True. The mapping should be in github so people could add all case variations within reason.

I'd personally add (unicorn pivot|Unicorn pivot)--> "Stinking just made BS" on to it.

jermo11y ago

What would be great is to be able to pass the text as a URL parameter or save the text in bsFiddle. Something like:

http://www.sansbullshitsans.com?bs1234

That would make it easier to share my bullshit on social media and align strategies with product synergy.

phaemon11y ago

My invented mission statement made it through unaltered.

"We reinterpret the existing synergistic environment to create an overarching fluidity that will encompass both the paradoxical business lexicon and the mainstream black swansong."

I hope I haven't inadvertently created some new buzzphrasing..

kilian11y ago

Beware! If you have droid sans installed, this will overwrite it (make sure to name your fonts!)

pixelambacht11y ago

Oh, nice catch. I'll fix that tonight. Edit: fixed, thanks again

geoah11y ago

OSX Chrome 40 64bit issue: Pasting text copied from anything that support formatting via html will retain font/size from copied text and thus BS font will not being used. Even Cmd+a and removing the text will retain wrong font.

kybernetyk11y ago

That's OS X default behavior for rich text editing controls. You're supposed to us "Paste and Match Style" instead of just "Paste" if you don't want to retain the original formatting attributes.

pixelambacht11y ago

Thanks. I think the contenteditable div was to blame. I changed this to a textarea, should fix that problem.

jhou211y ago

"internet of things" gets through the b.s. filter. Kindly fix. Thank you!

ygra11y ago

Also synergy is bullshitted, but synergies not.

antimagic11y ago

Yup, personally I don't see the point of doing anything if it's only going to give me one synergy...

1 more reply

Aoyagi11y ago

Lovely! Needs a "translator" for sites along with BS counter.

thegeomaster11y ago

Something like https://github.com/mourner/bullshit.js ?

Aoyagi11y ago

Heh, something like that, thanks.

helb11y ago

It's not the same thing, but it would be easy to adapt (see content_script.js) – https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt

mosselman11y ago

All I got it to sensor was 'startup' and 'flow' by pasting in all the titles from HN. So I am pretty proud that I can't come up with such things more naturally :).

RyanMcGreal11y ago

Great concept. Improve it by adding the plural and gerund forms of the bullshit jargon words: synergies, leveraging, and so on.

WhitneyLand11y ago

I'm going to make a list of everyone who comments on this post as people I may enjoy working with on a future project.

Silhouette11y ago

I tried "It's like bullshit bingo but for geeks."

Apparently it is quite happy to be described as such. :-)

qznc11y ago

Also https://xkcd.com/1288/

zem11y ago

missed 'synergistic' and 'mobile-first', though it did get 'leverage'

grigio11y ago

why "cloud" isnt censored?

bhayden11y ago

needs "internet of things" too

Gorkys11y ago

Any way to automatically apply this to techcrunch.com? I imagine not much would be left.

hessenwolf11y ago

I expected it to pick up Big Data. (not that I am against key-value stores)

pgt11y ago

Seems to be missing the "digital strategist" ligature :).

cabirum11y ago

does not work in IE - "@font-face failed OpenType embedding permission check. Permission must be Installable."

pixelambacht11y ago

This should be fixed now. If you download the font again, it should be installable. (If you could check and let me know I'd be eternally grateful! I don't have a Windows machine nearby.)

cabirum11y ago

nope, not fixed yet, same error. fsType bit should be 0.

1 more reply

pixelambacht11y ago

Thanks for reporting. I took the webfont version of Open Sans as that was smaller. I'll change the permissions tonight.

benoliver99911y ago

The image at the very bottom made me laugh.

jlukanta11y ago

I think this is great to test your pitch!

pix6411y ago

Caps breaks it.

ygra11y ago

That's probably quite tricky to fix as ligatures are case-sentivive. It makes little sense to have an fi ligeture applied to FI, as well. And the longer the letter combination, the more variants you'd have to include (2^length).

pdpi11y ago

To be fair, you only need three to cover the vast majority of actual uses: variant, Variant, VARIANT.

drdeca11y ago

this falls victim to the scunthorp problem. e.g. the word "fragile" becomes fr<bs>.

KhalPanda11y ago

Scunthorpe*. References to that problem always greatly amuse me, I live literally down the road.

stevep9811y ago

That purple color is amazing!

lwh11y ago

Great now every HN post appears to be the same story.

plg11y ago

Can we have one for science please.

novel

innovative

groundbreaking

paradigm shift

etc etc

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

97 comments

bshimmin11y ago

I was disappointed it didn't censor "Meticulously hand crafted" or "Made with love in San Francisco". Otherwise, rather lovely.

pixelambacht11y ago

Submit a pull request :) https://github.com/RoelN/SansBullshitSans

m_t11y ago

Same with "Disrupt all the things".

raverbashing11y ago

Synergistic wasn't censored in my case (but leverage was)

2 more replies

mojuba11y ago

WorldWideWayne11y ago

Any use of the word "Gorgeous" should also be bullshitted (esp. when written by the makers/providers of said app).

pixelambacht11y ago

If you like to know about what goes into creating a font like this, check my post about it: http://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/

It's mostly command line tools, so don't worry about any artistic ability (I didn't).

mark-r11y ago

Why so careful to choose Droid Sans for the main font, then use Comic Sans for the substitutions? Isn't Comic Sans the property of the most lawyered-up tech company on the planet?

pixelambacht11y ago

The difference is that I used Comic Sans in the "design" of my censorship bars — I didn't redistribute the Comic Sans font itself.

dojomouse11y ago

I love it, but it let this go completely uncensored:

"This transformative change in paradigm allows us to move beyond conventional thinking and kickstart the data driven era."

Gonna go ahead and flag that as a bug :-)

pixelambacht11y ago

Good catch. I'll put the font on Github tonight. Create a ticket (er even better, a pull request), and we'll add that bullshit!

SeanLuke11y ago

Needs work. Only about 10% of the relevant terms in Weird Al Yancovic's "Mission Statement" were marked out.

http://lyrics.wikia.com/%22Weird_Al%22_Yankovic:Mission_Stat...

TeMPOraL11y ago

Please add one exception - "Cloud" should be turned into "Butt", not bullshit. That's what the laws of the Internet say.

Otherwise, amazing work!

thebouv11y ago

Github is hosted in the butt, so I agree with your suggestion. I'll make a bullshit pull request and upload it to the butt soon.

davegardner11y ago

Does anyone know how well search engines cope with ligatures? If they don't I expect it won't be long before we see spam sites using ligatures as a way to hide their spamminess.

jerluc11y ago

Ligatures shouldn't affect search engines, as they will index the text of the pages, not the fonts/visual representation themselves.

derefr11y ago

I assume the problem would be the other way 'round: text that says one thing to search engines, but then uses a custom ligatured font to say something entirely different to users.

michaelmcmillan11y ago

fit2rule11y ago

[1] https://www.fontfont.com/how-to-use-ff-chartwell

qznc11y ago

There are more fun replacements than versions of "bullshit".

    the agile unicorn funded an uber immersive beta below the fold.

    the [bunk] [hogwash] [stultified] an [oafish] [foolish] [foolery] [in sheer madness]

Tricky: Make sure "a" vs "an" is still used correctly with replacements.

TazeTSchnitzel11y ago

Replace "an" with "a", assuming "a" will sometimes be pronounced "ey".

geoah11y ago

Bullshit-ify bookmarklet. Create a bookmark with the following code as the url and click it on any website. :)

https://gist.github.com/geoah/b2eda5b6cb7169bbbadb

ps. Chrome seems to be removing the `javascript:` part when pasting the code.

lmm11y ago

Chrome does that to make self-XSS harder.

pixelambacht11y ago

That is awesome! I think Fx and IE might choke on the cross-domain font requestiness though.

bzle11y ago

Yessssss!! This is going to be fun.

XYEaQMZJvS11y ago

I've actually read corporate "mission statements" that don't even sound like English. Like, not just a few buzzwords, but near-complete gibberish in places. What possesses people to do this?

tormeh11y ago

The goal is to write something that people can rally behind but that's at the same time not divisive. So it needs emotional impact without meaning, and thus we get corporate bullshit.

cheez11y ago

sinaa11y ago

They might have been using this: http://cbsg.sf.net

andrewfong11y ago

Mission statement by committee?

PhasmaFelis11y ago

I'd like the see a version that replaces "the Cloud" with "the internet" and "in the Cloud" with "on the internet." The meaning is 100% unchanged--try it!

nemoniac11y ago

Chrome extension that replaces occurrences of 'the cloud' with 'my butt'

https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt

arihant11y ago

Nothing happened for "It's a 5 billion dollar market and we need only 1% of it."

I think they should work on incorporating phrases too. Regardless, this is insanely great.

WhitneyLand11y ago

I like your observation, but technically would this fall under bullshit or delusion?

I guess it's a matter of definition. Does bullshit require intentionally trying to bullshit someone, or is it sufficient to speak bullshit even if you actually believe what you are saying?

wingerlang11y ago

It would be fun if the sentence "Meticulously hand crafted by PixelAmbacht" had some of the ligatures. I expected it to have but it didn't.

vanderZwan11y ago

zafka11y ago

There is definitely a need for this in the art world. There is actually a bullshit artist statement generator out there that could be grepped for inclusion.

zafka11y ago

http://www.artybollocks.com/

cfstras11y ago

For even more fun, install the font and put the following in your user stylesheet:

  * {
    font-family: 'Sans Bullshit Sans', cursive !important;
    text-rendering: optimizeLegibility !important;
  }

rl311y ago

What better way to put this font through its paces than the classic Web Economy Bullshit Generator:

http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html

OzzyB11y ago

And here I was thinking I was the only one who noticed this :)

Now all we need is something to "bullshitize" all those scroll-down parallax websites with a nice duotone-fullscreen-photo-at-the-top...

lukeholder11y ago

haha, favourite part is the logo satire at the bottom of the page.

seanhandley11y ago

Not working in Chrome 40

MrBuddyCasino11y ago

Definitively not working in Chrome 40 on OSX, but Firefox does. Lovely idea.

fugyk11y ago

It is working on OSX Chrome 40 in my case.

bobbles11y ago

Yeah if i type anything in it just shifts everything down the page

pixelambacht11y ago

I think this was because of the contenteditable div. I now stuck a plain ol' textarea in there, that should fix the problem.

spdustin11y ago

Woah, did I miss something? Chrome has problems with contenteditable?

pbowyer11y ago

Working for me, but only if I type into the textarea (not paste)

sumitviii11y ago

Works if you paste as plain text (Ctrl + Shift + V).

GhotiFish11y ago

If you're not willing to make the jump to a font change, you can get Cloud2Butt for firefox or chrome and it will help a little.

lordelph11y ago

The more interesting part for me was how they made it http://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/

TL;DR version: they made a font with custom ligatures, so that the sequence of glyphs that make 'synergy' are replaced with a single 'bullshit' glyph!

qnaal11y ago

I didn't see anything in the spec[1] about case insensitivity- but as long as the table is being generated programmatically, covering capitalized forms could be in order.

[1]http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/gsub.htm

MayanAstronaut11y ago

True. The mapping should be in github so people could add all case variations within reason.

I'd personally add (unicorn pivot|Unicorn pivot)--> "Stinking just made BS" on to it.

jermo11y ago

What would be great is to be able to pass the text as a URL parameter or save the text in bsFiddle. Something like:

http://www.sansbullshitsans.com?bs1234

That would make it easier to share my bullshit on social media and align strategies with product synergy.

phaemon11y ago

My invented mission statement made it through unaltered.

"We reinterpret the existing synergistic environment to create an overarching fluidity that will encompass both the paradoxical business lexicon and the mainstream black swansong."

I hope I haven't inadvertently created some new buzzphrasing..

kilian11y ago

Beware! If you have droid sans installed, this will overwrite it (make sure to name your fonts!)

pixelambacht11y ago

Oh, nice catch. I'll fix that tonight. Edit: fixed, thanks again

geoah11y ago

kybernetyk11y ago

That's OS X default behavior for rich text editing controls. You're supposed to us "Paste and Match Style" instead of just "Paste" if you don't want to retain the original formatting attributes.

pixelambacht11y ago

Thanks. I think the contenteditable div was to blame. I changed this to a textarea, should fix that problem.

jhou211y ago

"internet of things" gets through the b.s. filter. Kindly fix. Thank you!

ygra11y ago

Also synergy is bullshitted, but synergies not.

antimagic11y ago

Yup, personally I don't see the point of doing anything if it's only going to give me one synergy...

1 more reply

Aoyagi11y ago

Lovely! Needs a "translator" for sites along with BS counter.

thegeomaster11y ago

Something like https://github.com/mourner/bullshit.js ?

Aoyagi11y ago

Heh, something like that, thanks.

helb11y ago

It's not the same thing, but it would be easy to adapt (see content_script.js) – https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt

mosselman11y ago

All I got it to sensor was 'startup' and 'flow' by pasting in all the titles from HN. So I am pretty proud that I can't come up with such things more naturally :).

RyanMcGreal11y ago

Great concept. Improve it by adding the plural and gerund forms of the bullshit jargon words: synergies, leveraging, and so on.

WhitneyLand11y ago

I'm going to make a list of everyone who comments on this post as people I may enjoy working with on a future project.

Silhouette11y ago

I tried "It's like bullshit bingo but for geeks."

Apparently it is quite happy to be described as such. :-)

qznc11y ago

Also https://xkcd.com/1288/

zem11y ago

missed 'synergistic' and 'mobile-first', though it did get 'leverage'

grigio11y ago

why "cloud" isnt censored?

bhayden11y ago

needs "internet of things" too

Gorkys11y ago

Any way to automatically apply this to techcrunch.com? I imagine not much would be left.

hessenwolf11y ago

I expected it to pick up Big Data. (not that I am against key-value stores)

pgt11y ago

Seems to be missing the "digital strategist" ligature :).

cabirum11y ago

does not work in IE - "@font-face failed OpenType embedding permission check. Permission must be Installable."

pixelambacht11y ago

This should be fixed now. If you download the font again, it should be installable. (If you could check and let me know I'd be eternally grateful! I don't have a Windows machine nearby.)

cabirum11y ago

nope, not fixed yet, same error. fsType bit should be 0.

1 more reply

pixelambacht11y ago

Thanks for reporting. I took the webfont version of Open Sans as that was smaller. I'll change the permissions tonight.

benoliver99911y ago

The image at the very bottom made me laugh.

jlukanta11y ago

I think this is great to test your pitch!

pix6411y ago

Caps breaks it.

ygra11y ago