Ironically, the popins caused my $120 phone's browser to hang and had to be force quit :)
Loads fine and smooth in Firefox on a 3 year old Android (midranger)
Design of This Website (2021)
71–80 of 261 posts
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#72I fund gwern unreadable, despite their focus on typography. Maybe it's just my b rain not working very well with serif fonts.
> serif fonts
Can't understand why websites choose serif fonts. I find long passages of text a chore to read when the font is serif. They're less readable than sans-serif, as the little feet on every letter adds up to unnecessary visual clutter.
And when rendered as white text on a black page, with compacted line spacing, the contrasty serif fonts won't be inviting to the reader.
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your site is great (and minimalist) -- honestly, really really very good job. One note: in general there's a UX recommendation not to use flags when you mean languages. http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/ I'm not exactly sure the best way to solve this for your blog. Maybe something like adding alt-text to indicate "German Language" and adding a parenthetical to the end of titles "(German)" or something?
Very good point, and I've thought about this a lot. Still not sure what the best solution is... there is also a "flag-mashup" of the Austrian, Swiss, and German flag, but that's looking weird, too. Maybe a combination: a small icon with the three flags in one row, and underneath, the text "German post".
> a small icon with the three flags
this does not address the main problem that flags do not correspond to languages. German is spoken in more than "the three" countries, and in these countries there are more languages than German. Thus, using flags is insensitive and alienating to German speakers from other countries (e.g., Belgium), and non-German speakers from these three countries (e.g., Lugano).
And this is just for German! The situation is even more complicated for nearly all other languages in the world. Please, never use flags of states to identify languages. I have been on the receiving end of this unnecessarily offensive thing, and it did not feel nice.
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#74For 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…
Comparing Gwern's to your website is really interesting. I'd argue, Gwern's website is a good example of minimalist design, whereas the website you posted is the opposite. To me, minimalist design is as little design as possible (Dieter Rams). All design elements need to serve and enhance usability/functionality of the product. That doesn't mean that the total functionality of something needs to be minimal. E.g. you…
> Gwern's website is a good example of minimalist design
Eh, disagree. hypertele-Xii's website gets out of my way when I'm reading, and that's key. Gwern's website litters the body of the post with all kinds of stuff that the average reader won't use.
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#75Love the comments. Blows my mind how diverse the reactions are.
I read most HN on a 9 year old iPad. It's savage, raw compute would be fast enough, but limited RAM and pinned to a very old version of Mobile Safari. I generally keep JavaScript disabled, otherwise hangs are all too common.
If I can't at least read the basic idea of a web article at these settings, I move on. Perhaps it's arrogant of me, but I'm exasperated by current web design practice that requires megabytes of JavaScript to render a landing page.
`gwern.net` does not suffer from absolute madness, but the use of custom font means that the site is a blank page for thousands of milliseconds, and this old iPad has trouble scrolling the page of text even after the font is rendered.
My comments are probably irrelevant, but I'm not going to be surfing the web on a 16-core workstation with 32 gigabytes of RAM.
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#76The first time I saw this website, which was a year ago, I liked it so much that I was reading the code. This looks a new design, it's good but I like the earlier one more.
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#77It's clear that a lot of love and attention to detail has gone into the making of this website. I like the typography, I like the layout on desktop, I feel like that's very much complete, apart from one thing I'll mention later.
As another person has commented, it does feel inspired by Tufte stuff — though I actually find the Tufte CSS implementation to be preferable to look at aesthetically and preferable for actually consuming content: https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/
Things I would change:
- the pop-up windows when hovering links etc. are incredibly annoying. There is a button to get rid of them, but that button needs to be on the side with the other customisation options imho
- vertical spacing would look better than indentation for new paragraphs on mobile, it would help the text not look so densely packed, but maybe that's just my preference. It's usable just feels like the text is squashed in (I'm looking at it on an iPhone X). The choice of indentation for new paragraphs looks fine on desktop.
but that's just me and I'm no one and my opinion is meaningless.
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#78I like the minimalism of Gwern's site, but the text formatting doesn't feel especially readable. Dan Luu's site has a similar problem https://danluu.com/nothing-works/ by the time I get to the end of a line, it's hard to find the beginning of the next one. Also maybe a matter of taste, but it feels to me like serif fonts are good for books but not so great on the web. The most readable text formatting I've seen on the web is PG's website http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html short lines, sans-serif font, tight paragraphs with space between them.
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#79Yet again, this is a website that has clearly only been tested on a hiDPI screen. At 100% scaling on Windows, the serif font used doesn't kern or render properly; crossbars in letters such as 't' and 'f' are overweight compared to other strokes, and makes the font look uneven. Designers all seem to think we use 4k screens at 200% scaling, for that ultra smooth look, when in reality, that's far from the case[1]. Edit:…
Looks fantastic on a real operating system at 1920x1080. Gwern is many things, a few of them positive, but he's not a designer. He's just a guy with an internet connection. The site works, though. Just install a better operating system, ideally with X11, that can do proper typography.
> he's not a designer. He's just a guy with an internet connection.
His website is wonderfully designed, so I am having a hard time understanding your point…
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#80It says it is using sidenotes instead of footnotes, but all I see in the article is footnotes at the very bottom.
The page is responsive. The sidenotes seem to always be available at the bottom as footnotes, but if your browser window is wide enough they also show up beside the location they appear in the text.
I'm not seeing them as sidenotes with a maximised browser window on either my landscape (2560x1440, no scaling, which I'd consider wide) or portrait (1080x1920 – though that being thin I'd not expect width sensitive things to be present there) screens. Just foot-notes and pop-overs when interacted with.