Project Minimum Wim: Creating The Lightest Font for Web Documents

Necessity is the mother of invention, but it is also a persistent facet of human nature to pursue experimental creative ventures within fairly arbitrary parameters that might not be relevant in the real world. For example, the use of a wide variety of typefaces to serve different needs has been standardized through a process that has carefully refined the designs of various fonts to provide maximum visual clarity even to viewers with special needs.

A novelty typeface named Minimum Wim, on the other hand, is an attempt at creating a typeface that remains barely legible to English readers despite adhering to a highly restrictive sense of minimalism that involves thick block-like shapes. Every letter technically exists as a square that has been divided into a 3-by-3 grid, and each of the cells and their corresponding rows and columns can have very basic parameters adjusted as if they were simple HTML grids.

The website explaining the structure behind the Minimum Wim typeface explains how a given cell within a grid is made to assume one of four strictly defined states and how each of the nine cells can be defined as one of these base states before implementing further modifications. The cell can either be empty, full, half-full along its left face, or half-full along its top face. This structure can then be modified into more distinct and smoothly flowing fonts through an additional and separate layer of code. For example, this code can resize the empty segments of a "half-empty" cell to make the cell look more like it is "a quarter empty," and it can uniformly round two opposite-facing corners of a given letter for every letter and numeral.

The website also makes it a point to explain how a typeface having a set of nine cells with scarce few definitions each results in a typeface that does not need to occupy much file space. In fact, at 59 bytes, this typeface would be one of the smallest ever created, though it is clear that many readers would have great difficulty reading it because of that. For more information click here https://raffinaderij.booreiland.amsterdam/minimalwim/.