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A List Apart 5.0

alistapart.com

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Re: A List Apart 5.0

#41

Post by DanBC »

I like it. I dislike the weird stupid half cut header. (Because it looks like there's a sticky header, but it's not a sticky header, and it feels like the font is broken. That's a dissonance that I don't get from print-typography experimentation.) But I like the "big" (readable) fonts. I'd probably make the body font a tad bigger, but I guess that's just me. I wouldn't have a bright white background either, but again that's mostly me. It's nice when a website needs a minimum of tinkering to make it readable.

There are (as they say) a few oddities. The link on "Why are links blue" is not blue, it's black.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#42

Post by arrrg »

bbx wrote: post #14

Oh, it's that Grey Period [1] all over again... I loved the previous design [2]. It only used 2 fonts (and default ones, for that matter): Georgia and Arial. But it didn't feel 'cheap'. The font-size, letter-spacing, small-caps, weight and style variations provided a versatile set of text layout. The spacing and colors were perfect too, and yielded a well-thought and pleasant visual hierarchy. It is one of the few we…

The font size used to be horrifically small. This is a big step up, for this change alone.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#43

Post by DanBC »

kmfrk wrote: post #34
ahi wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the font size issue is because of display resolution. It looks perfect on my screen, but I usually have to zoom into pages to make them readable.

I imagine it'd look fine on a MacBook Air. It doesn't on a 23" monitor, that's for sure. I want to believe that the people behind it didn't bother to test it on different viewports, but I have created websites that look fine on everything from iPhones to large monitors without writing viewport-specific CSS. It just seems incredibly sloppy, which is hard to believe for a company like ALA.

> but I have created websites that look fine on everything

Just checking, but really "look fine on everything", or "need to be zoomed in by many people"?

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#44

Post by FireBeyond »

mnicole wrote: post #26

I'm kind of at a loss for words. It used to be unique and friendly, and now it is just another Medium, 37signals, altered Bootstrap-looking thing with no personality. Not including dates in the highlighted articles on the homepage (and only highlighting two to begin with?), along with putting it at the bottom of the "More From" is a huge miss (as the date of these types of articles is important to the context and to…

"Not including dates in the highlighted articles on the homepage (and only highlighting two to begin with?)"

Which is basically intended only to increase page views. If you're searching for something about web design, and Google's results show the slug for an entry as "Sep 21, 2004", you're probably a lot less likely to read that than the other link that is "current". So, better to take out a date altogether. The only person who loses out is the viewer, who might rely on sometimes vastly outdated information (says me, who has spent the last couple of days looking at Crystal Reports forums and having to discard search results from the early 2000s and even 1990s).

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#45

Post by Silhouette »

bbx wrote: post #14

Oh, it's that Grey Period [1] all over again... I loved the previous design [2]. It only used 2 fonts (and default ones, for that matter): Georgia and Arial. But it didn't feel 'cheap'. The font-size, letter-spacing, small-caps, weight and style variations provided a versatile set of text layout. The spacing and colors were perfect too, and yielded a well-thought and pleasant visual hierarchy. It is one of the few we…

The Grey Period seems to be like Flat Design and Big Fonts: there's an unwelcome general trend at the moment to dumb everything down to the point of being... well, dumb.

Subtle visual effects like gradients and shadows and the use of different colours don't just make a site or UI look pretty, they also give cues about how it works. At the moment, it seems like everything is just another flat, grey rectangle, and we've reached the point where sometimes you literally can't tell whether something on the screen is a block quote, a button, the title of a drop down menu, or possibly even more than one thing arranged in a toolbar...

These new trends can't die fast enough, IMHO. Too many projects are sacrificing both usability and aesthetics just to be fashionable.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#46

Post by camus »

welcome to the "appification" design era , where every web site is dull, flat , look like each other and look like crap on laptops and desktops.

"Generic", 0 personality design may work on tablet but that's it. And what is with these huge text fonts ? it's just not readable , reading is not about how big letters are but how the eye is able to identify blocks of text. I just cant read the text , it's just too difficult and exhausting.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#47

Post by oulipian »

kmfrk wrote: post #34
ahi wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the font size issue is because of display resolution. It looks perfect on my screen, but I usually have to zoom into pages to make them readable.

I imagine it'd look fine on a MacBook Air. It doesn't on a 23" monitor, that's for sure. I want to believe that the people behind it didn't bother to test it on different viewports, but I have created websites that look fine on everything from iPhones to large monitors without writing viewport-specific CSS. It just seems incredibly sloppy, which is hard to believe for a company like ALA.

The home page looks terrible on my 13" Macbook Pro, the illustration takes up almost the entire screen. Everything feels oversized and unbalanced.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#48

Post by jrode »

gyardley wrote: post #23
pgrote wrote: post #4

I am using Chrome on Windows 7. The menu bar on the top of the page cuts off the title and the bottom of the page slightly cuts off the * FOR PEOPLE WHO MAKE WEBSITES. Is that the way it should look?

It's intentional. I can't say I care for it - I've tried to scroll the missing part of the type onto the screen a couple times now. You can fix this pretty easily if you use a browser extension like Stylebot to customize your page styling - it's great when something just annoys you aesthetically. Here's my first pass at a correction that seems to work with the main pages, although I'm sure I'm missing something somew…

Adding this css changed my whole impression of the site. (I just inserted at the top w/ firebug, had to add !important to the .deadly-subtitle styles.)

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#49

Post by run4yourlives »

Sometimes, the biggest issue with designers is that they design. They're a lot like programmers that way; further optimization is often only a step backward.

The old, JSM design was an absolutely stunning example of what web design can be. It looked like a magazine. It read really well. Hell even the ads fit like an accessory.

It's really hard to improve something so good. And this new design pretty much proves that.

Unfortunately, their audience are people more concerned with trends and 'what's new' than those of us that prefer neat and predictable content delivery. I'm sure in their echo chamber, they will overwhelmingly agree that the design is "fresh" and "great".

Let that be a lesson to developers everywhere about spending too much time with our own kind and not enough with the general population.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#50

Post by kmfrk »

DanBC wrote: post #43
kmfrk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine it'd look fine on a MacBook Air. It doesn't on a 23" monitor, that's for sure. I want to believe that the people behind it didn't bother to test it on different viewports, but I have created websites that look fine on everything from iPhones to large monitors without writing viewport-specific CSS. It just seems incredibly sloppy, which is hard to believe for a company like ALA.

> but I have created websites that look fine on everything Just checking, but really "look fine on everything", or "need to be zoomed in by many people"?

Nah, it looks fine. You can zoom in, if you want, of course, but it's entirely readable on a retina screen.

Of course, those have been very sparse in layout such as blogs, so it's not a solution that fits all, but in a case like this, it would work just as well.

A site like Hacker News obviously needs optimization for different viewports.

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