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Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

ia.net

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Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#91

Post by Izkata »

fodkodrasz wrote: post #49
creata wrote: post #35

This site, and many other typography-adjacent sites, have comically large text on my desktop computer. What's up with that? (Maybe I've just misconfigured my browser.)

The cause is you got used to comically small text. That site is fine readable size (unlike the interface we are exchanging opinions on). Though it is still readable on 80% zoom, slightly eye straining on 70%, but it is far from oversized.

I need to put it at 70% while leaning back to not strain my eyes. 40% is when it finally gets smaller than here (which I find just right) and could become eye-straining for me in the other direction.

Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#92

Post by Izkata »

vandahm wrote: post #71
creata wrote: post #35

This site, and many other typography-adjacent sites, have comically large text on my desktop computer. What's up with that? (Maybe I've just misconfigured my browser.)

He explained this once, but it's been years and years and I don't have a source link. His argument for using the large fonts hinges on the fact that you keep your desktop monitor farther from your eyes than you do printed materials like books and magazines. Accounting for these distances, a 16-pixel or 18-pixel font size on screen is similar to an 11-point or 12-point font on printed material. Somewhere on his site,…

> desktop monitor

I guess that partially explains it, I'm on a laptop which is naturally closer than a desktop monitor.

Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#93

Post by red_trumpet »

vintagedave wrote: post #83
alecst wrote: post #3

I admire all the work the typographers do to make amazing-looking websites, and yet I prefer to read sites (like mathpages, or Dan Luu's site) which have next to no styling. They're just easier for me to read. I'm definitely not hating, but I feel like it's good to keep in mind where the point of diminishing returns is.

> next to no styling MathPages (which I just looked up) has styling, but its styling is the _browser default_. And that default has mostly not changed for a quarter century. It is simple, and familiar, though I think a few tweaks like bigger margins against the window edges would make it more readable. One example: https://gist.github.com/JoeyBurzynski/617fb6201335779f8424ad... May I spruik my own site? I have a very…

Going on a tangent here, but may I ask why you don't have hyphens enabled? Especially with justified text, one tends gets large spacing around words without hyphens, which seems to counteract the effect of larger spacing after ending a sentence.

Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#94

Post by Izkata »

thrwy_918 wrote: post #29
xnx wrote: post #12

Typography should be left to the user agent and user style sheet. Attempts to make sites "pixel perfect" is the worst habit from the print-world that designers brought online with them.

what percentage of users would you estimate are interested in choosing or writing a user style sheet?

"User agent" is the more important one. Allow the browser to deal with the system it's presenting on (mobile vs desktop, for example).

Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#95

Post by chrismorgan »

kuhewa wrote: post #79
shadowbanned0 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is obtuse. Why are you going from one sentence, saying the font size is disproportionate or whatever, then saying your font is Noto Sans? It's fine to pick Noto, that is not my disagreement. But if you are having one setting by the typographer and then choose to override them... yeah, it might be ugly. Because you changed it and are not a typographer. A typeset might not look good in every setting. That's why we…

I can agree with the parent comment that the typography on that page is atypical and not in a good way. Too large to make it easily readable on mobile, not enough margin. Perhaps that's forgivable since it was written 17 years ago before the mobile era. But even in desktop mode, size of typefaces jumps around for seemingly no real reason. Repeated use of the same graphic of historical typesetting for no apparent reas…

No idea what it looked like in 2006 (what domain did they use before ia.net?), but here’s it in 2017: https://web.archive.org/web/20170322053052/https://ia.net/to.... No ridiculously large text, no gratuitous/injudicious hero image (inappropriately chosen automatically for legacy content and not reviewed or excluded), no gross inflation of low-size images (“mobile-first”), just basic sensible design. It’s the usual, a redesign/reimplementation that meshes poorly with existing content (… and honestly probably new content too, just not so badly). I bet it’s been through at least four redesigns since it was written. And there’s no way the text would have been anywhere near that big in 2006.

Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#96

Post by jeroenhd »

velcrovan wrote: post #86
jeroenhd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A surprising amount, actually. Mobile phones rezoom and reflow text and content automatically, and if you click reader mode, take over presentation entirely. I don't agree with the idea that all CSS should be banned, but the pixel-perfect designs, that seem to come from Photoshop, are definitely annoying because they have rarely been tested on anything but what the designer had lying around. Have a device with a diff…

Except that the mobile browser does all that reflowing and resizing at the direction of CSS (its own fallback CSS in the absence of supplied applicable CSS). Restricting CSS to any degree is in no way a solution here. What you really want is for people producing websites to bother understanding CSS and how to properly direct the design in a device-independent manner. Because CSS is fully capable of doing so at this p…

Mobile browsers do all kinds of special tricks that you need to manually disable. text-size-adjust is one of those properties that was added long after browsers artificially resized fonts to be larger than specified by CSS (and is still considered experimental from a standards point of view).

I wouldn't trust websites to apply my phone's font size the same way browsers do. Websites that do override the zoom factor often end up with huge fonts on my phone because I have the font size turned down (what's the point of a 6" slab of glass if you scale up the text so you get the same amount of information as on a 3" screen?).

The more power you give to CSS, the more power you give designers like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68936634/how-to-ignore-t...

Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#97

Post by FinnKuhn »

vandahm wrote: post #71
creata wrote: post #35

This site, and many other typography-adjacent sites, have comically large text on my desktop computer. What's up with that? (Maybe I've just misconfigured my browser.)

He explained this once, but it's been years and years and I don't have a source link. His argument for using the large fonts hinges on the fact that you keep your desktop monitor farther from your eyes than you do printed materials like books and magazines. Accounting for these distances, a 16-pixel or 18-pixel font size on screen is similar to an 11-point or 12-point font on printed material. Somewhere on his site,…

There is just one big problem with that - I use a Laptop and not a Desktop, which is a similar distance away from my eyes as a newspaper. The result is a website where everything looks like it has the size of the headline of a newspaper...

I guess in 2006 the resolution of monitors wasn't the same as it is today meaning (if the website wasn't updated since then) it was never tested on a 14 inch near 4k display.

Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#98

Post by Spivak »

Almondsetat wrote: post #52
MrVandemar wrote: post #14

My contention is that not only web-designers, but everyone who uses a word processor should get at least baseline training in typography and layout. It should be a short high-school course. The basic rules are not that hard. It's possible to make decent looking documents in Microsoft Word / Libre Office / Abiword / whatever, but people with no idea what they're doing (and no idea that they have no idea what they're d…

Yeah, just another niche high school course that everyone should follow, that’s what our schools need

All school subjects are niche outside of arithmetic, spelling, grammar, reading, writing, civics, typing and recess.

Offering practical subjects that people will actually use in their day to day lives can only be a good thing. Dudes go to college and don't know how to do laundry like good lord.

Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#99

Post by nextaccountic »

mrob wrote: post #58
nextaccountic wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the problem with the loudness war isn't the loudness per se, but the loss of dynamic range: if everything is as loud as it can be, there is no room for emphasizing anything. It's like, if you are always shouting, you can never raise your voice. Which is exactly what is happening with full contrast websites: if everything is at max contrast, there is no room for emphasis.

Printed text does just fine using maximum contrast all the time, and bold and italics for emphasis.

Maybe for text specifically you're right, but we use screens for other media like pictures and video. If we have to tone down contrast to make high-contrast text comfortable, we are also reducing contrast of other media, and this loss may be significant.

Now, if we had reflective monitors (like e-ink etc) we could just be comfortable with maximum contrast text (like printed text). I think the display technology is a problem here.

(But still: there are some books with yellowish pages which I find more comfortable to read than ultrawhite pages. Maybe such lower contrast pages are more expensive or something, or not adequate for all lightning conditions etc)

Re: Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

#100

Post by MrVandemar »

proc0 wrote: post #31
MrVandemar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Web sites now are applications with lots of interactivity. You should prefix that with "some", or even "most". But certainly not all of them. There are plenty of static sites still around from yesteryear, and plenty still being made today.

Maybe I missed it but the article isn't qualifying their prescription either. So yes I agree but the point still stands, interactivity is now the most important part of any website that is not a trivial website.

> interactivity is now the most important part of any website that is not a trivial website.

You calling my website trivial?

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