For a site that lists its #1 principle as minimalism, it sure has a lot going on at all times. Multiple menus all over the screen, many different kinds of links with distinct underline and icon suffix, popups within popups that reinvent OS window functionality, historiated initials, graphical horizontal divider with hidden links, a recommended articles carousel, and a very (visually) busy comments section. Minimal it…
Design of This Website (2021)
41–50 of 261 posts
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#42I wouldn't necessarily call this a minimalist design. I do like Tufte-style websites with sidenotes, but these don't show on mobile for this site, despite my tablet having a large screen. > Gwern.net used Baskerville, but system Baskerville fonts don’t have small caps. Can someone explain to me what is meant by this? I don't understand what not having small caps means. I use Baskerville in my LaTeX documents with Mic…
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Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#43It's terrible. When browsing this website, one needs to be careful not to move the mouse over anything that will trigger a popup and cover the page they are trying to read. It's quite easy to accidentally get to 3 layers of pupups. Popups are antipattern, at least when they appear automatic, without user interaction.
I also disliked the random wikipedia links, that appear to point to something [specific](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific), but then are just wikipedia definitions…
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#44For a site that lists its #1 principle as minimalism, it sure has a lot going on at all times. Multiple menus all over the screen, many different kinds of links with distinct underline and icon suffix, popups within popups that reinvent OS window functionality, historiated initials, graphical horizontal divider with hidden links, a recommended articles carousel, and a very (visually) busy comments section. Minimal it…
Of all the developer blogs I have came across, nothing beats this page for me: https://krasjet.com/rnd.wlk/julia/
It has a perfect blend of minimalism, functionality, aesthetic, typography, accessibility, and mobile-friendly design. I strive to design my blog around the same principles.
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#45For a site that lists its #1 principle as minimalism, it sure has a lot going on at all times. Multiple menus all over the screen, many different kinds of links with distinct underline and icon suffix, popups within popups that reinvent OS window functionality, historiated initials, graphical horizontal divider with hidden links, a recommended articles carousel, and a very (visually) busy comments section. Minimal it…
> If you want to see a professional minimal design, check out mine:
text-align:right? WTF?
This really hurts when reading. So, while it might be minimalistic, it's not good design.
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#46For a site that lists its #1 principle as minimalism, it sure has a lot going on at all times. Multiple menus all over the screen, many different kinds of links with distinct underline and icon suffix, popups within popups that reinvent OS window functionality, historiated initials, graphical horizontal divider with hidden links, a recommended articles carousel, and a very (visually) busy comments section. Minimal it…
Although I’d agree with the fact that gwern does have a more going on, I definitely don’t think your site is any more minimalistic, I’d ever argue it is far far from it. My first reaction was « THAT’s minimalistic ?? »
Can you elaborate on what you find superfluous?
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#47For a site that lists its #1 principle as minimalism, it sure has a lot going on at all times. Multiple menus all over the screen, many different kinds of links with distinct underline and icon suffix, popups within popups that reinvent OS window functionality, historiated initials, graphical horizontal divider with hidden links, a recommended articles carousel, and a very (visually) busy comments section. Minimal it…
> If you want to see a professional minimal design, check out mine: text-align:right? WTF? This really hurts when reading. So, while it might be minimalistic, it's not good design.
It's explained on the linked page, under 'typography':
> When your eyes read to the end of a line of text, they have to jump to the beginning of the next one. Left-justified text causes all lines to start at the same vertical, making your eyes sometimes miss the jump and begin reading a wrong line. This is why you're sometimes reading the same line twice by accident. By right-justifying instead, the left edge of the text is made variying, and your eyes have an easier time picking the correct next line.
You actually experience physical pain?
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#48I fund gwern unreadable, despite their focus on typography. Maybe it's just my b rain not working very well with serif fonts.
Not just you and I don't think the font is the problem in and of itself. The main thing for me is the design is extremely busy, distracting and just plain obtrusive in many ways. For example all the inderlining, annotations, popups with strange CDE-esque headings, the weird "broken image"-style picture they put next to some links for some reason. It constantly calls attention to itself rather than the writing being the primary focus and the design serving to highlight that.
It's quite startling how much better the site is when you turn on "reader" mode in the browser.
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although I’d agree with the fact that gwern does have a more going on, I definitely don’t think your site is any more minimalistic, I’d ever argue it is far far from it. My first reaction was « THAT’s minimalistic ?? »
Can you elaborate on what you find superfluous?
Colors. Lots of them.
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Small caps are what they sound like, uppercase characters the size of lowercase characters. Kind of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_caps
Hmm, interesting. Thank you. Is that true that "system Baskerville fonts" don't have them? I never encountered this in my LaTeX documents, but I suppose it's possible my LaTeX distribution is shipping its own Baskerville-like font. I'd need to look into that. I am trying to come up to speed about font sourcing (right word?) on the web. It's also somewhat unfortunate, because as far as my research can tell, I am unabl…
pdfTeX does not use your system fonts. It will not even load TrueType or OpenType fonts, but usually uses Type 1 fonts. Fonts for LaTeX come bundled with your TeX distribution like TeX live (on my Arch system present in /usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/).
If you want to use system fonts you should have a look at Lua(La)TeX (or Xe(La)TeX but I think focus shifted completely to the LuaTeX engine).