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Great! I can't read anything!
Minimal readability
I don’t think readability is the goal here. This is more of an experiment - a mental exercise, even - than anything.
Sometimes that could be used on purpose, for a banner etc. Having that struggle to decode it it makes it linger more in ones memory.

I find the presentation quite entertaining and visually stimulating.

Interesting! It’s definitely pretty difficult to read some of the variations but it is quite stylish, I don’t think I’ve seen a typeface quite like this before.
This is awful. It's like brutalist architecture: unreadable, pointless, hideous, and masturbatory.
That was painful to read!

It kind of feels like cheating with all the shrinking/expanding of vertical/horizontal cells.

Cheating, hacking, solving puzzles. What's the difference :) But yeah, it's not exactly 9 pixels.
I don't know much about these topics, but the style looks very 1970s to me. Looked at the Wikipedia article on Wim Crouwel and it seems some of his typography was from the late 60s, so not far off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Crouwel

Yes, looks 70s but is there anything wrong with that?
Nope. No problem here. Don't know why you would think my comment was meant to suggest it. I am presently a fan of many things from that time period. Very good decade for music, for instance.
Sorry for the incorrect interpretation, it felt like a criticism with the assumption that 70s is passe. I love a lot of 70s things as well.
I stopped reading after trying to scroll and seeing that the website messes with my scroll speed (and even worse, there is an annoying inertia effect).

Outside of this, the font may be useful for some specific design work, but it is unreadable.

Cool. Doesn't work at all in FF on Android, but at least I got to read the first two lines and the ‘scroll down’ message.
Works fine for me! Both regular FF and FF Preview on Android 10.
I don't know where the "hate" is coming from... Or maybe I just see this more as art and not something to be taken seriously as a technical suggestion.
me too: i thought it was a wonderfully artistic/design tool. no a replacement font for your terminal (what seems that most were expecting judging from their comments of disappointment)
Author here. This started as one of our monthly days of experimenting at our design agency https://booreiland.amsterdam — The concept of those days is to create something (anything) in 8 hours. The prototype of this was done in the day after Crouwel passed away so that basically was my starting point. I knew he worked a lot with grid-based type (and earned the nickname Gridnik because of that).

I see a lot of comments about readability. That's not really the point though, although I tried my best. It's more of a programming and design puzzle, to see what happens if all you have is a 3×3 grid.

I really enjoyed it, even if I did think it was going to be recommendations for a text editor config initially. How was it built? Looking through the compiled JS, it looks like it uses PixiJS (https://pixijs.download/dev/docs/index.html)?
Thanks! It uses PixiJS for rendering, the rest is custom JS.
I found it really hard to read, but I loved the presentation. It was definitely a much smoother parallax effect than the one that Apple did for the iPhone 11 launch page (though I'm assuming they've since fixed it). You should definitely be proud.
very neat, it would be interesting to see the 3x3 grid encoding used for steganography, especially in a game. Incidentally, this is another reason that Minecraft needs a vertical slab, an open trapdoor is one option but has a limited palette.
An interesting font by Wim Crouwel himself, much in the same spirit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Alphabet
It's the reason why the font was made eh
The font isn't very readable, but the website is very impressive.
Unreadable stuff + horrible scroll based interface. Whatever it is, it is not good design.
I think a font like this would fit perfectly in colorForth. Combining the Shannon encoding used by Chuck Moore [1] with a similar font would be an interesting exercise.

This font in particular is great. I am always intrigued by experiments that try to take minimalism to the extreme.

[1] https://colorforth.github.io/chars.html

Yea can't read that.

Thanks for doing the hard slog of filtering all the things that does not work, so others may avoid them :-)

As whoever said: "I did not fail, I discovered a thousand ways of not making a light bulb"

This website consumes about half my CPU. But for what?
Very designed. I'm just glad I don't have to read that font on a regular basis. One of those sad cases where “design” is the diametrical opposite of usability.