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Webdesigners: please make text readable
11–20 of 109 posts
Re: Webdesigners: please make text readable
#12There's a second problem that's popping up lately: font-face on the body text.
System fonts have been painstakingly hinted to make them more readable on-screen. Most web-embeddable fonts don't have appropriate hinting or are just plain bad choices for body text. Hoefler & Frere Jones (one of the most respected foundries around) haven't released embeddable fonts because they've been working on it for years.
The result is fuzzy text at small/medium text sizes. It's huge pain to read. It seems some designers forget that good typography is concerned with readability too.
Re: Webdesigners: please make text readable
#13Their script went wrong towards the end, with the following text on the dark gray background with the fist on it:
"Usability expert Jakob Nielsen has shown many, many times that reading on the computer screen is harder than reading printed material even without making the font illegible. And mobile is worse.
.. and many have written about why gray text is a crime here, here, here and here...
So what we're trying to say is..."
which did rather undermine their point.
Re: Webdesigners: please make text readable
#14Interesting you say about high contrast, all the examples are black on white. Do this mean all content related websites should be white backgrounds and black text?
I think the reason they used so many colors in their bombastic website is to demonstrate non-typical contrast solutions.
Re: Webdesigners: please make text readable
#15It's not just contrast that makes text legible or not, there are many other factors:
- Width of the text area - Line spacing - Font-size - Correct use of headings, paragraphs, emphasis etc ...
Actually low contrast is a great tool to have. You can't have high contrast all over the page otherwise various elements will be shouting for your attention. Controlling the volume of your copy is just as important as the factors I mentioned above.
Re: Webdesigners: please make text readable
#16Do they print books with black pages and white text?
No, they do not.
Re: Webdesigners: please make text readable
#17Propaganda by photoshop clone developers who don't want to design opacity layers into their interfaces.
In all seriousness, if everything was high contrast, everything would be SCREAMING AT YOU FOR ATTENTION. Webdesigners: use your personal judgement when identifying what should be high contrast (higher visual recognition priority) and what should be lower contrast (lower visual recognition priority) and all will be well.
FYI: the HN example on your site actually makes perfect sense. The high contrast content is almost always the thing I consider most important. Index: Titles of threads, Subpages: Comments.
Re: Webdesigners: please make text readable
#18I've gotten into the habit of modifying the CSS of web sites I frequent to improve the readability and usability in general. I do this using a plugin for the web browser. For instance, this is how the HN home page looks like: http://i.imgur.com/WaTQq.jpg This is the most perfect design because it's tailored to my needs. Here's how YouTube looks like: http://i.imgur.com/eZAsx.jpg Reddit: http://i.imgur.com/rnaxb.jpg
YouTube is very clean. I don't suppose you would share your CSS? If not, I'll do it myself...but it's always nice not to re-invent the wheel.
Re: Webdesigners: please make text readable
#19Any idea how this site was made? Was some kind of framework used or was it all hard coded?
Re: Webdesigners: please make text readable
#20It's amusing that a website arguing for readability makes extensive use of all-caps, well known to be difficult to read.