Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A List Apart 5.0

alistapart.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 87 posts

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#61

Post by camus »

jammmuel wrote: post #58
fhars wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

good design serves a purpose , the half letters serves no purpose. If i did this on my site everybody would say how stupid it is , but because it's from "design rockstars" it is controvserial ? i call it bullshit .

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#62

Post by mirkules »

silverbax88 wrote: post #27
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…

That site is a good example of how not to ever do web design. Really cluttered, bulky and sporadic.

What really struck me as visually jarring was the top bar and how it permanently overlaps the title, "A LIST APART". At first, I thought it was NoScript doing something funny, but it's the same in Safari. It just feels like a temporary menu bar that should disappear after a few seconds.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#63

Post by bryne »

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.

It's much more likely that you're creating websites that fail accessibility guidelines and that many people are forced to zoom in to read.

100%/16px is standard for article body copy.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#64

Post by camus »

Silhouette wrote: post #45
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'…

designers and users need to speak up about it , that trend is silly , horrible and i'm sick of it. Does it work on tablet ? maybe but it doesnt work at all on desktop, and they did not vanish obviously. The heck you dont even need designers anymore , there is no design at all on these website. flat , no texture , no balance , nothing ...

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#65

Post by dlf »

Is the title hiding on purpose? Also, should the menu bar be fixed?

A List Apart is certainly ahead of me when it comes to what's up with web design, so I'm honestly not sure if it's supposed to be like that or if there's something amiss.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#67

Post by Silhouette »

bryne wrote: post #63
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.

It's much more likely that you're creating websites that fail accessibility guidelines and that many people are forced to zoom in to read. 100%/16px is standard for article body copy.

The intro in the linked article is set with a 24px font size and 960px width. For me, on a good desktop screen, that is uncomfortably large on both counts for a full paragraph of body text.

The main part of the article, set at 18px with about 700px width, is sensible IMHO.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#68

Post by leddt »

jrode wrote: post #48
gyardley wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I agree, without this css I almost feel insulted by the header. With the css it's fine.

What's sad is that ALA now feels... ordinary. It used to be very aesthetically pleasing, now it's just boring (my opinion).

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#69

Post by stan_rogers »

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.

They fixed the too-small-font problem (finally!!) at the beginning of March last year, making it a very reasonable read, and without changing the overall design much.

Re: A List Apart 5.0

#70

Post by larrydavid »

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…

Medium, 37 Signals and ALA look nothing like Bootstrap at all, so I'm not sure why you made that comparison.

I am not a fan of this new redesign at all and feel like Medium and 37 signals do the simple/clean layout approach much better than A List Apart. But as with all three designs, the primary focus is on the content, which I guess is why some people seem to think they lack 'personality'.

Post reply on HN