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Design of This Website (2021)

gwern.net

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Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#81

Post by chalst »

fgrsnau wrote: post #50
bmitc wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> 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).

Luatex seems the more promising technology from the point of view of continued evolution of the Tex ecosystem, but there's been talk of Luatex being the successor to Pdftex for over ten years and it was held up by the fact that Luatex is not superconservative in the way it changes Tex layout and is less so than Xetex.

I've not really followed the discussion about succession to pdftex in Texlive in recent years, but it'd definitely be a change to their risk-averse ways if they did simply change 'latex' to mean 'lualatex'.

Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#82

Post by ManuelKiessling »

enriquto wrote: post #73
ManuelKiessling wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I get it, but - what's the solution? At least the flags, while being offensive to some, are generally understood as a "signal for language".

Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#83

Post by mdoms »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #47
martin_a wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The right align is absolutely horrible and in no way improves readability. The fact that your website is literally the only one I've seen in multiple years using that style should have been a clue.

Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#84

Post by creata »

seanhunter wrote: post #48
wetpaws wrote: post #23

I 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 t…

Does CDE stand for "Common Desktop Environment"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment

But yes, those popup headings are way too chunky.

Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#85

Post by bradley_taunt »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #34

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…

Would argue the same as others that this still falls more into “brutalist” rather than minimalism.

My website[0] is far from ideal, but certainly falls in line better with the term “minimalism” (page speed, assets loaded, initial paint etc)

0: https://tdarb.org/

Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#86

Post by chanc3e »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #54
icelancer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colors. Lots of them.

Black, white, magenta, and orange. That's a lot to you? It's very few to me.

Yourself and Gwern both need to learn how typography works before you declare yourselves arbiters of digital design.

On the plus side, your site is friendly in reader view.

• Never justify text in digital • Never right align long form in digital • Both need to learn balance between type size and line height

Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#87

Post by tinus_hn »

watersb wrote: post #75

Love 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 exasper…

If the iOS on there is not too ancient you can use the filters in Firefox for iOS to block custom fonts. But although I’m not interested in the discussion I’d suggest upgrading to a supported device.

Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#88

Post by bradley_taunt »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #46
gouggoug wrote: post #36

Earlier 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?

(Not OP) But I would point out the “fixed” elements used for the top and bottom bars eats away a large amount of real estate for users (I’m using an iPhone SE for reference)

Just my two cents.

Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#89

Post by chanc3e »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #58
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #34

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…

Sorry, that's not minimalism. gwern.net isn't either; I'd call that "brutalism" instead. THIS is minimalism: https://manuel.kiessling.net Precisely in the sense of "NOT a lot going on at all times". Just the content, presented pleasently. And importantly, it's not only minimalism in look-and-feel, but also technically: even a long post with an embedded image like https://manuel.kiessling.net/2021/05/02/tutorial-react…

This is lovely looking, quick to load and easy to read. Props.

Take notes people!

Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#90

Post by epolanski »

I like the design, but semantics and accessibility aren't great.

We have lists implemented like divs, navs like divs, lack of appropriate attributes, aria labels and few other things.

That's not great considering there's basically only static content without interaction.

Articles speaks about optimizing for performance but will still attempt to load 150kb of analytics library and doesn't handle fallback fonts and font rendering properly. What's the point of obsessing over bundle size when you will still shove fonts and analytics when loading the application?

In every one of my projects I always try to convince stakeholders and designers that they will find fonts that will be great among the system fonts and that it won't be that much of a difference to users generally (there's plenty of successful enterprises and top 50 websites out there that only use os fonts and make $$) and what I get are poorly implemented fonts with inconsistent heights and vertical positioning across different OSs.

And the irony is that since most of your company runs the same OS (MacOS) where this issue is not visible it's like it doesn't exist.

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