Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

A playful web tool that blends multiple typefaces into a single “cursed” font is delighting designers and developers, who are using it to create ransom-note aesthetics, subtle visual pranks, and intentionally uncomfortable typography. Commenters swap ideas for evil combinations like mixing Helvetica and Arial, tweaking kerning or every nth glyph, and using ligatures to change words or detect copy‑pasting and AI usage. Alongside the humor, some raise concerns over accessibility, licensing, and the potential to turn such font manipulation into more serious infrastructure, such as serverless “Fonts as a Service.”

Overall reaction

  • Very positive reception; many call it hilarious, beautiful, “diabolical,” and say they spent more time than intended playing with it.
  • Several mention actually laughing out loud, saying it improved their mood or “lengthened their lifespan.”
  • Some users report strong negative-but-enjoyable feelings (disgust, anger, anguish) and say that’s exactly the point.

Favorite presets and creations

  • Presets like Times New Bastard, Temu Sans, Royal Ransom, Nervous Sans, Sneaky Bastard, and Impacter are repeatedly praised.
  • Temu Sans in particular resonates as a perfect parody of shady manuals / “cheap e‑commerce” typography seen in real life.
  • Users share custom monstrosities: Papyrus mixed with Comic Sans, Courier with periodic vertical squish, Helvetica/Arial mixes, serif–sans alternations, subtle skew for ruined kerning.

Use cases and pranks

  • People want to use these fonts in games (escape rooms), ransom-note aesthetics, joke work emails, and personal notes.
  • Multiple suggestions for subtle “evil” uses:
    • Fonts that swap specific words via ligatures (“red” renders as “green”).
    • Ligatures that introduce typos or spelling variant changes.
    • Fonts that degrade after a certain character count or every nth glyph, or that reveal copy-paste/AI use.

Accessibility, ethics, and captchas

  • Some propose using such fonts as CAPTCHAs or to detect AI.
  • Screen-reader users explicitly ask people not to build security mechanisms on top of distorted fonts.
  • One thread argues accessibility should extend capabilities, not constrain experimentation; another questions that premise, with a counterpoint that engineering is about designing for many kinds of users and limitations.

Technical and implementation discussion

  • Users infer a JS/WASM-based font engine doing on-the-fly rendering; one imagines a “Fonts as a Service” model for remote font rendering and security isolation.
  • Mention of CSS @font-face and unicode-range tricks for related effects.
  • One bug reported on iOS/WebKit (out-of-bounds memory access).
  • Questions raised about performance vs. doing transformations on the client.

Related tools and ecosystem

  • Links shared to other experimental or “glitchy” font tools and joke fonts, including ambigram/combination tools and self-censoring fonts.
  • Some note potential licensing issues when remixing proprietary fonts and share an anecdote of legal pushback for a mis-kerned Helvetica parody.