I liked the design, ... until I scrolled down to the ads and Disqus section ...
Design of This Website (2021)
181–190 of 261 posts
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The site you link is nearly identical to mine, only less visually-oriented (which I feel is excusable as my site focuses on visual arts, not programming). > Just the content, presented pleasently. Please explain which part of my site isn't just the content, presented pleasantly? > minimalism in look-and-feel, but also technically [...] weighs in at under 200 KiB The exact page I linked to [0] weighs 160 KiB, less tha…
> Please explain which part of my site isn't just the content, presented pleasantly?
I'm not the person you asked, so forgive my jumping in here, but I feel I have a helpful answer.
Design serves function. The function of a website with text is to be read. Your site's design is hard and unpleasant to read. Here's what made it difficult for me to parse and read your page:
1. The title looked like a banner offering a newsletter or cookie preferences. I ignored it. My eyes jumped to the subheadings "router" and "template". It took me too long to discern what I was reading. At first I thought it was a list of blog posts titled "router" and "template".
2. The white, thin text on black background was difficult to read. My astigmatism makes dark on light a strong preference for me. Light on dark can be okay if the font has enough weight to minimize deformation of the letter forms. Here you chose a very thin font.
3. The ragged left edge of each paragraph is harder to scan. The return sweep took longer. It is also reminiscent of poetry which felt out of place.
4. The bright background lines drew my eye in a downward on the right and upward on the left, further making the return sweep less comfortable. It is brighter than the text and nagging at my peripheral vision.
5. The text in the comment box was too low contrast to be comfortable.
6. The right menu was invisible to me until I was critically looking over the design.
It was very stylistic and striking. Aesthetically good. But these design choices are at odds with the functionality of reading, at least for me.
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for that reference. I didn’t know about it until you posted. Note to downvoters: that was a sincere comment.
... downvotes? Weird. There's other cool web archiving stuff out there too that's just the one I know about.
It went into the negative very quickly. For some reason “thanks for the reference“ must’ve come off as snarky, probably because I was too stupid to find it myself but others weren’t!
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#184Love 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…
You could try installing an RSS app on the iPad and browse your favorite sites in an efficient way, although I'm not sure modern RSS apps even work on old iPads, so I think you might have to get the latest model of iPad for that to work. RSS greatly diminishes your screentime and it's up to you to filter out crap you don't want to see (mostly through curation of the feeds you subscribe to).
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#185Soon after my startup launched, Gwern asked to do a test of our reading-enhancement technology on his site. His test is now described in the Abandoned section on the linked page. [1]
I learned a very valuable lesson from our interaction: having someone test out your software in a public way is great, but if they fundamentally disagree with how the UX should function, you can't cede control.
Gwern disagreed with us on two fundamental points: (1) which color schemes to use, and (2) whether the user should be aware of (and presumably control) the activation and settings of the technology.
We knew from our usage data that practically no one used the greyscale theme — almost everyone used our colored themes. We also suspected that running a test where users were not made aware of the purpose of the color gradients would confuse and possibly annoy users — especially if they couldn't turn it on/off or change the colors.
The results were not surprising to us: lots of people were confused, and the color-based themes were more popular than he anticipated. In all of our subsequent partnerships/testing, we firmed up our UX guidelines and didn't so much control of testing procedures.
It was perhaps the right move to be flexible in the beginning — who were we, next to the mighty Gwern! But looking back it would have been much better for us (and I think Gwern as well) if the UX had been done in a way that gives users control. One nice looking example of our desired UX is here. [2]
1: https://www.gwern.net/Design#abandoned
2: https://unreasonable.is/how-to-stop-working-and-be-more-prod...
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#186The design is bad because it uses full justification, which hurts readability by making all the lines the same length, which weakens the visual cues for vertical position, and makes the spacing between words inconsistent. But I don't really care, because the site works correctly with Firefox's Reader View, which is better than any custom design because it always looks the same.
On the contrary, I find justified text way easier to read and pleasing, as my eyes don't have to scan varying line lengths, but rather go along a fixed line length.
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#187For 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…
For me, scrolling on your website is unusually slow and with unusably high latency. Not sure why.
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#188For 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…
Gwern makes it pretty clear that the objective is a minimalist aesthetic, not a minimalist design through-and-through.
Not to mention that the same paragraph specifies a design requirement of the site:
"What does it take to present complex, highly-referenced, link-intensive, long-form text online as effectively as possible, while conserving the reader’s time & attention?"
Even the minimalist answer to that question would probably feature the things you're objecting to.
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#189For 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…
I don’t think your link is an example of minimal let alone professional design…
Re: Design of This Website (2021)
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flags for currency mostly work because nations choose their flag and choose their currency. Flags for languages doesn't work because it's common for the same language to be popular in different countries and for multiple languages to be popular within a single country. ISO language abbreviations would be a better alternative than the flags but I don't think anything is needed at all; anyone who knows German will reco…
> Flags for currency mostly work Do you think so? Which flag would you use for euros? Obviously not the european union flag, since there are many countries inside the EU with a different currency (like Sweden or Poland) and even countries outside the EU whose currency is the euro (Montenegro, Kosovo, Andorra, ...).
I ...don't think that's actually a dealbreaker.
If the context is currencies, everyone would know that a european union flag refers to the euro.
it's a visual cue, not a translation into hieroglyphics.