If you don't find something to argue with in this book, you haven't thought about it enough. There's a dividing line, though, between books that are full of Wrong (and so you should ignore them) and books which are full of Considered Opinion (and are worth arguing over); this one falls firmly into the latter category for me.
Agreed. There are multiple parts of this book where I actually felt frustrated with the author I disagreed with them so much, but I still consider it to be one of the best web typography books I've ever read.
It took me a while to figure out that links in the text were ALL CAPS instead of underlined and/or blue. The hover effect was so subtle that I didn't notice it at first. I ended up hovering over acronyms pretty often, as I was never sure if those were also links. That is not good design. There's also the issue that while the site may look pretty, it requires downloading 5 megabytes of CSS. At every job I've had, desi…
Respectfully dude, I clicked through to your sites because I was curious to see how you apply your own design advice. It seems that mostly, you don't. Your blog [1] even employs the monochrome, typo-centric style that Butterick seems to like. [1] https://geoff.greer.fm
Respectfully dude, it seems you haven't read the comment you replied to. The only criticism of geoff's site you seem to have is the aesthetic similarly to Butterick's, yet nowhere did he criticise Butterick's style, only its implementation.
It took me a while to figure out that links in the text were ALL CAPS instead of underlined and/or blue. The hover effect was so subtle that I didn't notice it at first. I ended up hovering over acronyms pretty often, as I was never sure if those were also links. That is not good design. There's also the issue that while the site may look pretty, it requires downloading 5 megabytes of CSS. At every job I've had, desi…
> It took me a while to figure out that links in the text were ALL CAPS instead of underlined and/or blue.
Nitpicking, but in this context I can't help myself: they're not ALL CAPS but sᴍᴀʟʟ ᴄᴀᴩs instead :)
It took me a while to figure out that links in the text were ALL CAPS instead of underlined and/or blue. The hover effect was so subtle that I didn't notice it at first. I ended up hovering over acronyms pretty often, as I was never sure if those were also links. That is not good design. There's also the issue that while the site may look pretty, it requires downloading 5 megabytes of CSS. At every job I've had, desi…
I prefer when websites use "serif" or "sans-serif" (as opposed to "system font stacks") and respect my personal font choices. Sadly some people never change them from Times/New Roman and Arial.
I think the thing that makes this ebook stand out, is that it's native web content. Most "ebooks" on the web resemble the infamous photograph-of-a-printout web design strategy: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Web_0_0x2e_1 Your average ebook is textbook or published book content put in the media equivalent of an iframe. Butterick's websites are not that. I have a friend who's a huge fan of Butterick and did a similar…
It's really ironic how, with all that effort, your dude went with justified alignment. I can't even read justified text these days because my brain keeps muttering that it is wrong. Also the text could use some margins when displayed on a phone.
I don't find the justified text on that site bad at all. It has proper hyphenation and I couldn't find any awkward spacing. The text seems to flow well.
Butterick made his own programming language called Pollen [1] to publish this site. [2] Pollen is implemented in the Racket programming language. [3] He has another online book called Beautiful Racket [4] about language-oriented programming in Racket. [1] https://pollenpub.com [2] https://practicaltypography.com/why-racket-why-lisp.html [3] https://racket-lang.org [4] https://beautifulracket.com
just as a note, the beautiful racket book is cool, but i feel the subtitle is a little misleading. you aren't really using racket to build the languages. the book uses #lang br and not #lang racket. it's subtle, but it means you don't really learn the racket tools. https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/from-br-to-racket-base....
`#lang br` is a pretty thin wrapper around the regular Racket tools. And you can use any of the tools with the rest of Racket. For example, in my course which taught building languages with Racket this year, we used the `brag` library that Matthew built for Beautiful Racket, even though we didn't use the book or the rest of the tools.
It's really ironic how, with all that effort, your dude went with justified alignment. I can't even read justified text these days because my brain keeps muttering that it is wrong. Also the text could use some margins when displayed on a phone.
I don't find the justified text on that site bad at all. It has proper hyphenation and I couldn't find any awkward spacing. The text seems to flow well.
It becomes worse on phones, with fewer words per line.
It took me a while to figure out that links in the text were ALL CAPS instead of underlined and/or blue. The hover effect was so subtle that I didn't notice it at first. I ended up hovering over acronyms pretty often, as I was never sure if those were also links. That is not good design. There's also the issue that while the site may look pretty, it requires downloading 5 megabytes of CSS. At every job I've had, desi…
I prefer when websites use "serif" or "sans-serif" (as opposed to "system font stacks") and respect my personal font choices. Sadly some people never change them from Times/New Roman and Arial.
Some people? I’d warrant >95% of people not only have never touched that settings, they also don’t know that is exists or what it does