Hot take: my monospaced font made every zero look like a donut and I almost shipped it
Last week I was building a monospaced font for my terminal theme and the zero kept looking wrong, so I added a slash through it to fix the issue. But when I rendered a test page with about 200 zeros in a row, the slash made every number look like a sideways donut with a bite taken out. I laughed for a solid minute because it looked so bad, then I remembered I had not checked how it looked at smaller sizes. After resizing to 12px the slash turned into a tiny gray smudge, so I swapped it for a dot inside the zero instead. Has anyone else had a glyph trick backfire like that when you scale it down?
The slash zero thing is so real. I did the same kind of thing with an icon set I was messing around with a while back, drew this little coffee cup icon and at 64px it was perfect, cute little steam curl and all. Then I tried it at 16px and it just looked like a brown blob with a stick coming out, like a lollipop that fell on the floor. I spent way too long redrawing the steam as two dots instead, which honestly looked better anyway. Small sizes will humble you every single time.