241–250 of 445 posts
If every page did this then a contrary page with images would make the point against just words and everyone would agree.
Looking at simple page's like that all day would be depressing, I want beauty in my life, not just words which can be beautiful, that's why I read novels, I also want visual beauty.
"At it's heart, web design should be about words." No. The web is not just a place for text / words, that is not its heart and soul, and therefore neither is that the case for web design. It really never has been. I see no great argument in favor of words being the core over any other form of expression. Today's bandwidth more than allows for beautiful video, animation, high quality graphics and photos, etc. Or low k…
>The web is not just a place for text/words, that is not its heart and soul... It really never has been. I am thinking back when they named the protocol the HyperText Transport Protocol and the primary format the HyperText Markup Language, text was indeed the heart and soul of the medium. At one point, images weren't even displayed inline but via a helper app. This is why Mosaic was a big deal.
While I agree that the substance of a web page is the most important part of it, there's a whole lot of visual work that aids marketing, retention, and conversion, and while those things are often not appreciated by those of us who enjoy plain text, they are significant and have real benefits. The problem with all of the "You're reading this" and "You're still reading this" is that the only reason anyone read it is b…
I didn't cover how to drive traffic to a web page; that'd be a great "sister topic" to this one.
As an aside: that little link at the bottom of that page has converted better than anything else I've done. ;)
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> We run into trouble when we adopt some sort of "minimalism, always, ever, for everything" dogma. Evidence? Examples?
Is it not self-obvious that if every page attempting to serve up content similar to that in the OP (pictureless editorial), the web would be bleak and characterless? Not debating the effectiveness of that kind of design, but rather pointing out the obviousness that this sort of anti-"always, ever" statement is easily validated.
It's the anti qz.com.
Why is there so much hate for Quartz on here? It may be hard to read on a mobile device, but if you focus on just the articles it is very distraction free and easy to read. Nit-picking is fine, but overly criticizing is stupid when qz.com is miles ahead of almost every other publishing outlet online. Would you rather see more sites like qz.com that focus on content and navigation or more sites like traditional newspa…
For a site that's full of content, they make it hard to get that content. If they were failing at a hard problem, I'd be more sympathetic, but overcomplicating the business of putting text on a screen to that extent is just inexcusably narcissistic.
First time [1] my in-laws saw "the web" they were trying to find information about vacation spots in Brazil but their travel guide was obsolete, I found a web page a student had written up about where the best places to stay and see were in Brazil. I could almost see the dots connect when they realized that someone they didn't know, in Brazil , had written up a piece of information at some point that they were now se…
"At it's heart, web design should be about words." No. The web is not just a place for text / words, that is not its heart and soul, and therefore neither is that the case for web design. It really never has been. I see no great argument in favor of words being the core over any other form of expression. Today's bandwidth more than allows for beautiful video, animation, high quality graphics and photos, etc. Or low k…
It's unfortunate that the article doesn't try to actually make the case for the primacy of linguistic communication, and I'm not going to take the time to do it here either. I'll just say that while I agree with you that a diversity of media is better than just one medium, I spent my childhood, before the Web was built, reading books instead of watching TV on purpose, not by accident. Books without pictures. And it's…
I have some sympathy for your point, but I don't think the argument about video is valid. 99% of the web is crap. Always has been. Probably always will be. The crap includes text, video, etc., etc. That's why we have search engines and sites like HN -- to help us find the 1%. The existence of the other crappy 99% says pretty much nothing about the relative advantages of text vs. video.
Reminds me of the HTML hell page from Eric Raymond: http://catb.org/esr/html-hell.html
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That's a great anecdote. Out of curiosity, how did you find the site? I had just turned four at the time, so I don't quite remember what browsing the Internet was like then.
Because other people have given good answers, I just wanted to add.. the Web was so much better linked together back then. Prior to Altavista made searching useful most of the time, it was common to rely on jumping from one site to another through plentiful link pages, web rings, and lists of resources that people had put together. There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic…
I built postagon.com under this dogma but nevertheless I think that it comes with an almost arrogant touch if you deliberately publish an article in a format as simple as this and expect everyone to extract the message from an otherwise horrible reading experience.
What's horrible about the article? It's straightforward, conventional typography of the sort used in printed books for a long time.