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Comment by bovermyer | Hacker News Reader

As someone who writes about heraldry, I'm happy to see this here. I'm a little surprised, though. What about this is interesting for the Hacker News crowd?

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A program doesn't even need a GUI to have an aesthetic, and many here will spend hours or days chasing that just-right look in their projects.

Many hackers/devs that do not work directly in graphical design are surprisingly passionate about colors, fonts, angles, curves, animations...

There are many many projects that are forks of something else with a different skin on it or forked to allow the user to apply their own skin, many change the font of their terminals, hell entire linux distros are maintained entirely or almost entirely for purely aesthetic reasons.

Hell, a significant number of us have strong opinions about the visual shape of (fixed-font, usually monospaced) text in our code (eg, the various indentation style wars) or prose (eg, Knuth et al's anti-river typesetting algorithms).

Proper keming is a noble hill to die on.

Amen

I think the yellow heart situation brought it to a lot of people's attention. that was years ago but it was going around recently:

https://apatheticlexicographer.tumblr.com/post/7628346069794...

It seems there's a similar system in technical drawing to represent metals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatching#Representation_of_mat...

This is exactly why I knew what the article was about before clicking the link. I never thought there would be standards for colors though.

I wonder if ancient computer graphics systems for things like plotters or vector screens would interpret color as different hachure patterns. Maybe Tektronix can still accept a patch for PLOT 10.

A mix of interest in the various ways images can be represented in alternative formats and then applied artistically. I can't speak to why, but every time I see one of these techniques I'm fascinated by it, and want to play with it[1]. There's a regular stream of related posts that come up on dithering, half tones, etc, and tools people build off of them. I find everything from the history/why, the details of the techniques, and the artistic uses of them (in modern UI/prints that no longer _need_ them) all fun and interesting.

[1]: https://cloverich.github.io/artifacts/horizon-plate/dist/hor...

It's an interesting solution to a technical problem (conveying color via a monochrome medium)

Niche topics are often fascinating in their own way, even if you've had nothing to do with that niche before or won't have anything to do with it afterward.

What are your 2 favorite blog post about heraldy written by you?

What are your 2 favorite blog post about heraldy written by someone else?

Scroll to the hairy heart. And some forms of ASCII art can be considered a form of E.

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