Can You Customize My Startup's Login Page?

The advice on polish applies mostly to venture-funded startups trying to get users to move from existing $SOCIAL_APP to new $SOCIAL_APP; in this instance, sure, polish what you can at the top of the funnel.

For B2B products it's a little different. When you're holding an MVP in your hands, it's really hard to tell whether you're grasping a rusty old anchor that will drag you to your death, or whether you're looking at lightning in a bottle.

One quick way to tell is if businesses sign up and user it even though it's as fugly as can be.

If, when pitching the product to a potential sale, the subject indicates that they need particular cosmetic changes before higher-ups would approve it, then you're likely pitching a dud product.

If, otoh, they interrupt you during the pitch of that fugly product, and offer to trial it immediately, or buy the prototype, or call in a higher up, then you have the proverbial lightning in a bottle.

Cosmetics is, I think, a good indicator for B2B products - if people want it even though it's ugly, you're selling painkillers. If people want it only when it's pretty, you're selling vitamins.

> I want to like this page, I really do. But please don't use Computer Modern on the web... It's a pretty ancient typeface that's made for paper first, and looks bad on a raster display, even a pixel-dense one.

Looks okay to me (on desktop and mobile).

My take on readability wrt to blog posts is that the font doesn't matter as much as you think it does. Sure, don't use Comic Sans or some handwriting-equivalent, but any mainstream font should work (sans for headlines, serifs for content, maybe?)

The larger factors affecting readability:

1. The paragraph width. It's tiring to read a paragraph that's 250+ characters wide. Stick to 64-78 characters wide. I find setting max-width to 38em-42em best.

2. Line spacing - bump it up a little - 1.25em-1.6em is great at normal font sizes. You need to adjust as the font size increases.

3. Background color - muted colors are nice. Bright colors are not.

4. Foreground color - start with low contrast and increase it until the devtools in the browser tells you it passes the accessibility test.

Only after you have done all that, start playing with the font.