Typographic phrases (or: how to turn sayings geeky)

Written by Harry Roberts on CSS Wizardry.

N.B. All code can now be licensed under the permissive MIT license. Read more about licensing CSS Wizardry code samples…

A while ago I had the idea to express some old sayings in a silly, geeky way, using code and logic to express logically, the meaning behind some well known phrases. I got Illustrator fired up last night and decided to finally got a few made. They’re kind of obvious really, even a non-developer brain can make sense of them, and deciphering the saying is pretty simple, but I think they’re cool nonetheless.

Many hands make light work

There are lots of contradictions in sayings and phrases. Like this one, if many hands do make light work, then how does this next one work?

Too many cooks spoil the broth

A stitch in time…

While the cat is away…

Absence makes the heart grow fonder vs. time is a great healer

This one is another glaring contradiction, so I decided to combine the two into one poster.

Out of sight, out of mind

Two wrongs don’t make a right

This one doesn’t really follow the code paradigm, but I thought I’d include it anyway.

Got any more that would work in this way? Leave any suggestions in the comments.

Also, I do realise that, programmatically, not all of these posters make perfect sense. For example, $cooks > 'enough' doesn’t really work in a programming sense… It’s just a bit of fun!

N.B. All code can now be licensed under the permissive MIT license. Read more about licensing CSS Wizardry code samples…

By Harry Roberts

Harry Roberts is an independent consultant web performance engineer. He helps companies of all shapes and sizes find and fix site speed issues.