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A List Apart 5.0

alistapart.com

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Re: A List Apart 5.0

#51

Post by cypher543 »

frogpelt wrote: post #37
colmvp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it looks sloppy. It's intentionally styled like a magazine. Magazines deliberately break typographic conventions.

I've never looked at a quality magazine cover and thought 'did they mean to for it look like that?' I thought that with this page. So, that's one glaring difference.

That's because a magazine is printed and its appearance doesn't vary between people looking at it, so we automatically assume that it's supposed to look the way it does. A website can look differently depending on which browser is rendering it.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#52

Post by jere »

colmvp wrote: post #22
bullseye wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://imageshack.us/a/img228/8256/alat.png I see the same thing. I have a hard time believing it is intentional, but even so, I think it looks sloppy.

I don't think it looks sloppy. It's intentionally styled like a magazine. Magazines deliberately break typographic conventions.

Usually a magazine overlays its title with a very dramatic photo of a person, which makes the person stand out. And usually only a few letters are obscured. Our brains are quite good at filling in the details.

Example: http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/fashion/daily/2012/08/09/09-lady...

I'm a lot less impressed by a fricking navigational toolbar that obscures the top of every letter of the logo. What remains are the less recognizable bottom halves of the letters. The T and I (not shown, but also F) look identical for instance. I'll believe that this is intentional, but I think it looks horrible.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#53

Post by charlieok »

So they've got “articles”, “blog posts”, “link posts”, “columns” and a number of “topics”. They're “publishing more frequently—a lot more frequently”.

Fantastic! So why do I just see one “RSS” link in the footer pointing to http://alistapart.com/site/rss ?

Are they turning on the fire hose without giving users any way to control what content/topic/author they subscribe to? And these guys are the shining exemplars of site design and “content strategy”?

My feed reader just blew up with a slew of “new” entries from alistapart.com, apparently a result of their new platform not properly handling the identifiers from posts used on their previous platform.

I understand Zeldman & Co to be champions of web standards. RSS (and its sibling rival, Atom) is still the best decentralized way to subscribe to updates on the web that I know of. So why is their site apparently treating it with such little regard?

Am I going to have to unsubscribe because they overwhelm me with stuff in their feed with no good option for fine-tuning?

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#54

Post by sjwright »

arrrg wrote: post #42
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.

I browse Hacker News at 200% zoom.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#55

Post by mnicole »

FireBeyond wrote: post #44
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 onl…

Only highlighting the last two posts, without dates, is a disservice to readers - particularly new visitors - who want to get a better idea of what topics the site covers and how often it does so. Tack on the fact that ALA is one of the only sites I visit sporadically because I know it will be relevant and now I'm lost trying to figure out where I'm at and where I should go. A content site should highlight the content, not hide it. Do they publish a certain amount of articles per timeframe, or is it random? If it's random, now the design is playing favors to posts who aren't up as long as the others.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#56

Post by tokenadult »

The key paragraph in the article kindly submitted here appears to be below the fold:

"Pirates ship

"To launch on time, we have knowingly held off on finessing certain details and (like you do) decided to suppress a few niceties until after the relaunch. If you spot a quirk in the UX logic, an inconsistency in the design hierarchy, or a curious flaw in the CSS, we are probably working on it."

As announced on my HN user profile, I am updating my personal website (which is seventeen years old, and which I last extensively updated in 1998). I'll party like it's 1999 by reading the new-and-improved A List Apart both on my desktop and with my Nexus 4 phone, and see what I think over a few weeks about how well the new site design responds to the huge range of devices used to acccess websites these days. This should be interesting food for thought.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#57

Post by recuter »

charlieok wrote: post #53

So they've got “articles”, “blog posts”, “link posts”, “columns” and a number of “topics”. They're “publishing more frequently—a lot more frequently”. Fantastic! So why do I just see one “RSS” link in the footer pointing to http://alistapart.com/site/rss ? Are they turning on the fire hose without giving users any way to control what content/topic/author they subscribe to? And these guys are the shining exemplars of…

I've had that happen countless times with different feeds, it is very rarely on purpose because as you say it leaves a bad taste.

For now, I'd chuck it up to a one-off snafu.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#58

Post by jammmuel »

fhars wrote: post #17
hpaavola wrote: post #11

And that's how you design blogs and similar sites. Put the content in the spotlight and shove everything else away.

But they are not putting content in the spotlight, they are putting unreadable letter bottoms and empty space in the spotlight, the content is shoved away to somewhere far down. Maybe the design works on a tablet in portrait mode, but not on a laptop screen. To see more the four lines of content there, you have to scroll.

As has been mentioned, the main header is a typographic curiosity, not a bug. Good design is often controversial. Programmer mentally is at odds with this notion. I like what they've done. It has brought greater focus to the article content. I'm all for bigger type, and the need to scroll is a non-issue in my mind.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#59

Post by charlieok »

recuter wrote: post #57
charlieok wrote: post #53

So they've got “articles”, “blog posts”, “link posts”, “columns” and a number of “topics”. They're “publishing more frequently—a lot more frequently”. Fantastic! So why do I just see one “RSS” link in the footer pointing to http://alistapart.com/site/rss ? Are they turning on the fire hose without giving users any way to control what content/topic/author they subscribe to? And these guys are the shining exemplars of…

I've had that happen countless times with different feeds, it is very rarely on purpose because as you say it leaves a bad taste. For now, I'd chuck it up to a one-off snafu.

Yeah, that's merely an annoying thing that seems to crop up occasionally with RSS.

My main frustration here is not finding a menu of feed options; instead, I just see one big site-wide feed.

I've had this frustration with many sites, and it's kept me from following things I otherwise would have followed. I'm just much more mystified when the entire aim of the site is “web design, by web designers, for web designers”.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#60

Post by rwl4 »

Weird to see this in their HTML code:
I'd probably remove that after I've made my decision about whether or not to officially support IE 6.
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