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The design philosophy of Great Tables

posit-dev.github.io

61–70 of 94 posts

Re: The design philosophy of Great Tables

#61
Would be great if the example tables were great for such a post. Like their remote correspondent's table: they've actually made it partially worse in the "great tables" style:

- now the dates are not vertically aligned, and

- the weights have repetition of units (lbs) (although losing the decimal is an improvement)

- the name column is way too visually "heavy", that's a style you'd reserve for a header, a simple bold would suffice

They've also retained other issues from the original like city not being a city, but a combo of city and region, or similarly no separation of the first name of a person, which is especially important for a diverse group of people

Re: The design philosophy of Great Tables

#65
post #12

Fantastic article, duly bookmarked. However. “The democratization of computational tables arguably began with VisiCalc in 1979… I mean, try it out and you’ll see that this is quite limited in more than a few ways.” Them’s fightin’ words. IMHO VisiCalc’s ability to generate models quickly changed civilization. It freed people to try out ideas at no cost and to view or manipulate data in ways no one could hope to do be…

same

Re: The design philosophy of Great Tables

#66
post #11

Tables are underutilized for how concise and descriptive they can be when making comparisons. It's a shame most text editors start with a blank table instead of inserting one pre-configured with some good design choices.

It’s funny you should say that because Apple’s tools all have preconfigured table styles, in Keynote, Pages and Numbers.

And they all suck.

Re: The design philosophy of Great Tables

#69
post #30

Imagine the web if every site was exclusively tabular. No UIs just a table of figures and a CRUD for modifying it. Something like hypercard meets excel

I'm less interested about web, but I think tables would work well for shell/terminal. If you squint, stream-of-objects and tables are sort of similar, so with some sort of PS/nushell style environment having a terminal with native table rendering ability could be great. I think lot of stuff we interact with in shell tends to be somewhat tabular in nature, but is now getting muddied by formatting it for dumb text terminals.

Just look at the first example on nushell frontpage: https://www.nushell.sh/ could that not look better with "Great Tables" or something similar?

Re: The design philosophy of Great Tables

#70
There was some design blog post several years ago, maybe not even surfaced on HN:

Creating beautiful tables both UI and UX wise, with some features being e.g dropping separator between columns (row?), doing some visual accents, etc.

And yes, the most distinguished feature was that the tables weren't looking like your busy PowerPoint non-tech organisation stuff, they were very modern yet simple.

I don't remember the specifics, but I was really impressed and regret not bookmarking the article.

Does anyone know of the article in question, and maybe could share the link?

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