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Stefano’s Linotype: Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design (CSS Guide)

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Re: Stefano’s Linotype: Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design (CSS Guide)

#3

Post by tjpick »

The title is pretty bad. Nothing earth shattering there and nothing that is specific to programmers. It's just that often times the programmer gets stuck implementing it because they have the technical smarts. I've seen similarly bad designs come from most corners of the company and from completely tasteless visual designers. It's not just programmers who commit design crimes.

Nevertheless, generally good advice, except the bits about filling your page with "lorem ipsum", and about not using black for the main text. The off-black/off-white stuff looks good when you take an image of the page and stand back 10 feet, but for people like me (ie without perfect eyes) is a complete pain when actually reading it.

Re: Stefano’s Linotype: Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design (CSS Guide)

#6

Post by kwamenum86 »

tjpick wrote: post #3

The title is pretty bad. Nothing earth shattering there and nothing that is specific to programmers. It's just that often times the programmer gets stuck implementing it because they have the technical smarts. I've seen similarly bad designs come from most corners of the company and from completely tasteless visual designers. It's not just programmers who commit design crimes. Nevertheless, generally good advice, exc…

What's wrong with using dummy text? How else can you ensure that as the content expands the page will not break?

Re: Stefano’s Linotype: Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design (CSS Guide)

#7

Post by tjpick »

kwamenum86 wrote: post #6
tjpick wrote: post #3

The title is pretty bad. Nothing earth shattering there and nothing that is specific to programmers. It's just that often times the programmer gets stuck implementing it because they have the technical smarts. I've seen similarly bad designs come from most corners of the company and from completely tasteless visual designers. It's not just programmers who commit design crimes. Nevertheless, generally good advice, exc…

What's wrong with using dummy text? How else can you ensure that as the content expands the page will not break?

It's ok, but I find it too "sunny day" to really be meaningful. You end up thinking your site looks awesome, and then when you get real, quirky, half filled in, random content in there the site looks broken anyway. You're better off to get some real content in there first and then design around that.

Re: Stefano’s Linotype: Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design (CSS Guide)

#8

Post by orib »

From the article:

     My suggestion for you is to do the following: start
     your CSS stylesheet with

     html {
       font-size: 62.5%;
     }
NO, NO, AND NO! I set my font size to what it is for a reason. Web designers need to learn to deal with it. If you're manually tweaking font sizes, you're doing it wrong. Please, leave them at the default values; they're that way for a reason. I want a website that doesn't cause eye strain. Make sure your site scales, and things work without absolute pixel sizes.

Re: Stefano’s Linotype: Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design (CSS Guide)

#10

Post by cschneid »

orib wrote: post #8

From the article: My suggestion for you is to do the following: start your CSS stylesheet with html { font-size: 62.5%; } NO, NO, AND NO! I set my font size to what it is for a reason. Web designers need to learn to deal with it. If you're manually tweaking font sizes, you're doing it wrong. Please, leave them at the default values; they're that way for a reason. I want a website that doesn't cause eye strain. Make s…

But, since it then allows the developer to use em measurements everywhere, doesn't that allow your override font size to look better on the page?
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