321–330 of 354 posts
Think of Knuth's warning against "premature optimization" and all the dumb decisions that have been justified on the basis of a poor interpretation of Knuth.
It’s true that many designers tend to look at text more like a texture. Instead of making it large and distinct they will make it small and light colored when it's in fact the only valuable thing on the screen. It's an unfortunate consequence of so much design today going minimal and more typographic, which makes it's hard to differentiate elements any other way than to start evening out the contrast. If everything t…
Every designer, or UI/UX person should work on a shitty CRT with a flicker and a bad green channel. If the design doesn't work under those conditions, it doesn't work.
I wanted to make a simple, fast loading site to put essays on. I thought, "Surely modern browsers render html 5 with these fancy new article tags on any device in a readable format, right?" Nope. Not at all. Shockingly bad. "But at least there's a CSS way to limit paragraph width to a reasonable number of words or letters that works on any device and that degrades gracefully without resorting to Javascript, right?" N…
Latex does not render in real time.
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As a designer, I agree completely. The problem is: interaction design really is a discipline in its absolute infancy. It's not graphic design. It's not engineering. It's not architecture. Pretty much anyone can just pick it up and start doing it. And the people who decide to ship shitty designs you're complaining about are more concerned with 'pageviews' or 'installs' (and in turn, their bonus) than actual usability.…
Designer here, how can we solve this? I'd love to have my work peer reviewed because design is so subjective and I feel like I'm probably making elementary mistakes despite learning for years.
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> I have no idea where to look on that page Everywhere? It's a page full of selected news headlines. You're not supposed to look at some particular place (except the big letter, highlighted few headlines that are presented as the most important), just to check which ones you want to open. So, not totally unlike the first page of HN. > For example the main headline right now is "TONIGHT: HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP!" Wha…
> So, not totally unlike the first page of HN. The front page of HN is a single list with headers at the top of the page and a footer at the bottom. It is a numbered list which shows me the title of the article, #votes, #comments, the domain name, who submitted it and the time since posted. At the bottom of the page there is an FAQ to explain to me what the page is if I've never been there before. Even if I've never…
Subjective though it may be, there are a lot of people who find black-on-white unpleasant to look at. I greatly prefer sites that don't use it, regardless of what they do with font and size. This could just be a case of conflicting preferences, but I don't think it has to be. Clear contrasts are achievable without insisting on #000/#FFF web design. - The most obvious improvement is simply keeping an eye on contrast.…
Like staring at a light-bulb. I prefer a light grey as a background.
Subjective though it may be, there are a lot of people who find black-on-white unpleasant to look at. I greatly prefer sites that don't use it, regardless of what they do with font and size. This could just be a case of conflicting preferences, but I don't think it has to be. Clear contrasts are achievable without insisting on #000/#FFF web design. - The most obvious improvement is simply keeping an eye on contrast.…
>Finally, we can choose colors which are not strictly grey. The HN background is a rather usable 244/244/235 - not far outside of light grey, but tan enough to provide more contrast than the pure brightness The key for HN readability is that the foreground text color is #000 -- pure black. (Pressing F12 in the web browser shows css style ".c00 {color = #000000;}" ). Like dredmorbius previously mentioned, shifting the…
I think this is a preferences thing. For me, solid black text almost always looks jarring, and is almost universally a worse reading experience than a dark grey.
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Eh... I think that's true in part, but I've also met people who really love that flat Metro design. It's hideous in my book, but it's trendy, yes, but that's because some people like it. More so than that, looking at website design from a monetary perspective: It's fast, cheap, and easy. It takes alot less time to put together a sleek modern website that utilizes the flat but nifty new CSS3 features than sitting down…
I actually really appreciate Google's Material Design... That said, many of the implementations skip or gloss over some of the nuances in web interfaces, and/or overdo aspects in practice. I also like a little more flat over the bubbly/hasbro toy look that was common in the late 90's. That said, it's about nuances... In the end, I find that starting text only, and laying things out in a text editor (like an ansi menu…
Designers are ruining software in general. iTunes, the iOS music app, and Google Maps are just a few pieces of software that started out relatively usable (if not exactly stable in the case of iTunes), and have been iterated and stylized to the point where I routinely get enraged by them. At least Google Maps has walked back that terrible accordion thing that literally drove me crazy. I basically think design is like…
> Designers are ruining software in general. I agree with you. But what I find hilarious about it is that in the 90s, there was a meme that software engineers cannot do usability very well, and you need specialized designers. I think it all comes down to humility. Think about and respect the user. Do usability studies and follow their results, like Microsoft used to do in 90s. Don't let your notions of aesthetics ove…
I'm so surprised that all attempts at solutions for "readability" so far seems to have addressed the actual article or post content only. I don't just want to read a sane looking web, I want to browse a accessible and sane looking web. I'd like to be able to activate a browser mode that cleans up not only the content of the site, but also the structure by creating simple and accessible navigation (perhaps according t…