What I don't understand about all this talk of layout and typography is why it is suddenly a good idea to have a website that consists of nearly 2/3 empty white space with a narrow band of text. Sorry but it isn't good typography if I have to zoom in to read your site.
The billionaire’s typewriter
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Re: The billionaire’s typewriter
#62Is it just my MacBook Air + OS X, or is the Font (ironically) on that site painful to read? Compare: https://medium.com/@willgossin/the-uncanny-valley-race-merit... To: http://practicaltypography.com/billionaires-typewriter.html [Edit: Also - no HTTPS? And No Favicon?]
The font is way too big in both cases, but aside from the former's weird slidy header effect and the latter's weird diamond link effect, they both seem comparably pretentious.
Re: The billionaire’s typewriter
#63What I don't understand about all this talk of layout and typography is why it is suddenly a good idea to have a website that consists of nearly 2/3 empty white space with a narrow band of text. Sorry but it isn't good typography if I have to zoom in to read your site.
It sounds like the site is not rendering correctly for you. The font size itself is (supposed to be) very large, so if you are zooming in, then it sounds like something's wrong. (Mobile device, maybe?) If anything, some folks might prefer to zoom out, not in.
As for the 2/3 empty white space, that is an attempt to have a measure (line length) [1] that is readable. A general rule of thumb is somewhere around 70 characters per line is comfortable to read for single-column text. Now, I tend to think that 70 characters per line feels pretty short on the web... in my personal experience, around 100 characters feels a lot better.
Anyway, if you're interested in typography, take a look at Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style.
Re: The billionaire’s typewriter
#64The original computing vision, the Mother of All Demos, was philosophically against designing text in the ways of the obsolete print medium. The focus was on inventing a new way of writing information altogether. Instead of having paragraphs go one after another as required by print, have maps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map of the argument, wikis etc. If we focused on this more, we might have reached a new level of communication efficiency by now.
Here we are arguing if we should let authors stylize text. Does this restyling of text help communicate more efficiently? Typically no, a long wall of text just needs to be set in a readable style.
Even this choice of presentation was supposed to be the reader's, not the author's. I do not care one bit about links appearing in a ♢ weird new way. Links should appear the same way, everywhere on the web. http://motherfuckingwebsite.com just needed some padding, nice font rendering, line spacing and you'd get Medium.
To the reader, Medium promises consistency of presentation that the rest of the web does not. That problem should really have been solved on the browser's end, by a style that applied to all articles, chosen by the user from existing templates.
The style should serve a functional purpose to the reader, be slower or faster to read, reduce eyestrain, etc.
The web was supposed to be more extreme than frozen pizza, more like astronaut's food paste. Skeuomorphic pizza in any form distracts users from the real purpose.
As far as Medium controlling your content, if the web was smarter you could put it somewhere else and the links would magically work. Centralization is a technically simple way to exploit a dumb network and the network should be fixed.
Re: The billionaire’s typewriter
#65"As a writer, the biggest potential waste of your time is not typography chores, but Medium itself. Because in return for that snazzy design, Medium needs you to relinquish control of how your work gets to readers." Amen. Finally, someone has put this simply. The issue here has nothing to do with type. The author does a pretty good job of pointing out why Medium's pandering to design is clearly B.S. — but…
It's a distraction from the fact that they own you.
1) Many people do not care to maintain a blog
2) Many people do not plan on writing regularly; maybe once every three months may even be a miracle, in which case a shared platform is preferable.
3) Writing on your own blog is like building your own restaurant in the desert instead of a strip mall, it will take a lot to get people to find it.
4) Sometimes you just want to share something, and you just do not feel like having your own blog is necessary for it.
5) Many who claim that Medium will own their content do not end up writing anything, hence their ideas, which could be truly beneficial to society, end up dying as a distant memory.
Re: The billionaire’s typewriter
#66The original computing vision, the Mother of All Demos, was philosophically against designing text in the ways of the obsolete print medium. The focus was on inventing a new way of writing information altogether. Instead of having paragraphs go one after another as required by print, have maps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map of the argument, wikis etc. If we focused on this more, we might have reached a new…
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Re: The billionaire’s typewriter
#67My favorite writing tool of all time is, without a question in my mind, LyX. It manages to find the perfect balance of minimal barriers to productivity, absolute power when I need it, and seriously professional grade results. It's like writing with iAWriter or similar tools, except I still have some basic structural options in the interface, and the end result generated is downright professional grade. I think the "W…
Back in my days in academia, I used LaTeX for math and physics. I liked that LaTeX separated out formatting of content from the display. It made it easier for me to focus on the getting the ideas and wording right and someone else worried about producing nice looking templates. Since then, I have switched over to Markdown for most of writing. There are still ways to embed LaTeX when needed for equations, but without…
What are you using to embed LaTeX?
Re: The billionaire’s typewriter
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in my days in academia, I used LaTeX for math and physics. I liked that LaTeX separated out formatting of content from the display. It made it easier for me to focus on the getting the ideas and wording right and someone else worried about producing nice looking templates. Since then, I have switched over to Markdown for most of writing. There are still ways to embed LaTeX when needed for equations, but without…
What are you using to embed LaTeX?
I've used pandoc to embed LaTeX equations in markdown.
Re: The billionaire’s typewriter
#69There are some things I miss about a typewriter, like the visceral satisfaction of pounding on the keys and watching the text emerge. I also miss typewriter fonts. Yes, I know I can get typewriter fonts, including the typewriter font that HD uses for its text entry boxes. I mean the unevenness of it due to mechanical variations, variations in the ribbon, etc., leading to every impression being slightly different. Com…
While they're typically considered gauche, there are typefaces which emulate a broken typewriter. I somewhat like those as well.
Re: The billionaire’s typewriter
#70What is the point of inserting a "◊" before each link? It looks ridiculous and distracts from reading the article.
I think he's experimenting with linking to other documents. I did something similar as an experiment (http://www.conman.org/people/spc/writings/hypertext/fragment...) but ended up just sticking with the default underlines.