Sans Bullshit Sans

Sans Bullshit Sans(sansbullshitsans.com)

370 points by nvie81 11 years ago | 97 comments

bshimmin 11 years ago |

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

pixelambacht 11 years ago | |

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

m_t 11 years ago | |

Same with "Disrupt all the things".

raverbashing 11 years ago | | |

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

mojuba 11 years 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.

WorldWideWayne 11 years ago | |

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

pixelambacht 11 years 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-r 11 years 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?

pixelambacht 11 years 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.

dojomouse 11 years 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 :-)

pixelambacht 11 years 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!

SeanLuke 11 years 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...

TeMPOraL 11 years 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!

thebouv 11 years 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.

davegardner 11 years 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.

jerluc 11 years ago | |

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

derefr 11 years 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.

michaelmcmillan 11 years 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.

fit2rule 11 years 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.

qznc 11 years 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.

TazeTSchnitzel 11 years ago | |

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

geoah 11 years 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.

lmm 11 years ago | |

Chrome does that to make self-XSS harder.

pixelambacht 11 years ago | |

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

bzle 11 years ago | |

Yessssss!! This is going to be fun.

XYEaQMZJvS 11 years 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?

tormeh 11 years 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.

cheez 11 years 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?"

sinaa 11 years ago | |

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

andrewfong 11 years ago | |

Mission statement by committee?

PhasmaFelis 11 years 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!

nemoniac 11 years ago | |

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

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

arihant 11 years 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.

WhitneyLand 11 years 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?

wingerlang 11 years 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.

vanderZwan 11 years 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"

zafka 11 years 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.

zafka 11 years ago | | |

http://www.artybollocks.com/

cfstras 11 years 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;
  }

rl3 11 years 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

OzzyB 11 years 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...

lukeholder 11 years ago |

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

seanhandley 11 years ago |

Not working in Chrome 40

MrBuddyCasino 11 years ago | |

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

fugyk 11 years ago | | |

It is working on OSX Chrome 40 in my case.

bobbles 11 years ago | |

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

pixelambacht 11 years ago | |

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

spdustin 11 years ago | | |

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

pbowyer 11 years ago | |

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

sumitviii 11 years ago | |

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

GhotiFish 11 years 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.

lordelph 11 years 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!

qnaal 11 years 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

MayanAstronaut 11 years 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.

jermo 11 years 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.

phaemon 11 years 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..

kilian 11 years ago |

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

pixelambacht 11 years ago | |

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

geoah 11 years 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.

kybernetyk 11 years 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.

pixelambacht 11 years ago | |

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

jhou2 11 years ago |

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

ygra 11 years ago | |

Also synergy is bullshitted, but synergies not.

antimagic 11 years ago | | |

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

Aoyagi 11 years ago |

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

thegeomaster 11 years ago | |

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

Aoyagi 11 years ago | | |

Heh, something like that, thanks.

helb 11 years 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

mosselman 11 years 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 :).

RyanMcGreal 11 years ago |

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

WhitneyLand 11 years 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.

Silhouette 11 years ago |

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

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

qznc 11 years ago |

Also https://xkcd.com/1288/

zem 11 years ago |

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

grigio 11 years ago |

why "cloud" isnt censored?

bhayden 11 years ago | |

needs "internet of things" too

Gorkys 11 years ago |

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

hessenwolf 11 years ago |

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

pgt 11 years ago |

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

cabirum 11 years ago |

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

pixelambacht 11 years 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.)

cabirum 11 years ago | | |

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

pixelambacht 11 years ago | |

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

benoliver999 11 years ago |

The image at the very bottom made me laugh.

jlukanta 11 years ago |

I think this is great to test your pitch!

pix64 11 years ago |

Caps breaks it.

ygra 11 years 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).

pdpi 11 years ago | | |

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

drdeca 11 years ago |

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

KhalPanda 11 years ago | |

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

stevep98 11 years ago |

That purple color is amazing!

lwh 11 years ago |

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

plg 11 years ago |

Can we have one for science please.

novel

innovative

groundbreaking

paradigm shift

etc etc