Basically I extracted the emojis from my Mac's system font. From there I downscaled them to 64x64 pixels and made them grayscale.
With this set of images I experimented with a few different algorithms. I ended up settling for just a regular ordered dithering (Bayer). But! It still didn't look that good. So what I ended up doing was normalizing the darks and lights for each emoji. This was because some emojis are lighter and darker than others. I wanted to create a uniform appearance for all of them.
So the process was (1) get emojis. (2) downscale + grayscale. (3) normalize tone. (4) dither. (5) then upscale
https://hypertalking.com/2023/05/08/1-bit-pixel-art-of-hokus...
08-may-2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866283 72 comments
22-apr-2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47863570 93 comments
With a proper combo o depth you can get a very nice result.
Thanks to your idea, now I am imagining printing different layers of foreground and background on glass and stacking them with spacers for parallax.
Not as detailed as these, and using 90/45 degree angles in keeping with the rest of their graphics.
https://developer.rebble.io/guides/app-resources/system-font...
You can implement it in PostScript, and there are many examples (with the PostScript code) in PDF specification (pages 303-307): https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/standards/p...
image-rendering: pixelated;
The site looks like it was abandoned in 2023, however.
I would gladly use this as an emoji set (alongside Chicago or Monaco).