[HN Gopher] Web designers should get good training in typography...
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Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)
Author : greenSunglass
Score : 129 points
Date : 2023-11-11 01:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ia.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (ia.net)
| Tactical45 wrote:
| Can anyone recommend a good course in typography?
| neilv wrote:
| One option is Matthew Butterick's "Practical Typography":
| https://practicaltypography.com/
| Beijinger wrote:
| No. But this should give you an idea about the issues in about
| 30-60 seconds
|
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/110133/visual-compar...
| alecst wrote:
| 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.
| rednafi wrote:
| Same. Not every webpage needs to look like stripe's homepage.
| atoav wrote:
| Guess what. Simplistic typography is also still typography.
|
| Just like design or VFX in films people tend to think about
| typography when they notice it is there. But good
| design/VFX/typography is often invisible.
| brailsafe wrote:
| The practice of typography includes everything from the very
| basic of readability of body text to headlines to how
| everything is laid out on a page, and sometimes that means
| doing as little as possible, because the defaults are often
| great.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| > Treat text as user interface
|
| > Slightly more famous examples of unornamental websites that
| treat text as interface are: google, eBay, craigslist, youtube,
| flickr, Digg, reddit, delicious.
|
| If only the article recommended doing just that.
|
| Gradients and spinning globes, and intricately designed
| animations aren't typography. Though Stripe's typography is
| exquisite. Amusingly enough, text that takes up the full
| horizontal space is not.
| criddell wrote:
| I've bought a bunch of Stripe's books and all the ones I have
| are beautiful objects. My one complaint is the text in some
| is too small for my aging eyes. I ended up getting an
| electronic version of Dream Machines for my ereader where I
| could choose a larger font.
| vintagedave wrote:
| > 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 simple site, with no
| Javascript, that embodies what I believe are good typographical
| principles. It has a particular focus on typographical layout
| reproducing century-old-style (remembering a hundred years ago
| is still a modern, post-WW1 design era!)
| https://daveon.design/about-dave-on-design.html#typography-&...
| alecst wrote:
| What is an example of a page with no styling, then, if not
| one that uses the defaults? :)
| vintagedave wrote:
| I get your point: there are no CSS stylesheets or style
| elements on MathPages at all. Thus, no styles...
|
| The thing is, there are no pages that use no styling!
| Defaults are styling: they are just choices the browser
| manufacturer made. Resetting those has its own cottage CSS
| industry: https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/
|
| I used to view default browser styles as not really styles.
| Then recently I started trying to use old HTML elements,
| like 'align', as a way to see if they behaved differently
| (solved problems with) CSS styling. It turned out that in
| Safari, Chrome and Firefox, the attributes behaved the same
| as setting CSS styles -- which makes sense from an
| underlying architecture point of view (why have two ways to
| set, say, left alignment?) but shows that the engines are
| CSS-based, that there is no such thing as not using styles,
| even using non-CSS, old-fashioned pre-CSS HTML.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| 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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > next to no styling
|
| Remember that "no styling" is just the default CSS styling for
| typography, which somebody painstakingly created so that it
| sort of works. Pretty much all you need to do to make perfectly
| readable text on the web is make the column narrower. You can
| certainly improve it, make it more beautiful and readable, but
| it's acceptable as is. The real problems arise when people
| override those default styles with worse ones. So, we can
| either force people to use their browser's proprietary
| typography--which is not the spirit of the web--or teach 'em to
| do it better, which should really take about an hour.
| kderbe wrote:
| (2006)
|
| In case you, like me, miss the dateline at the top and become
| more and more puzzled by the arguments and examples presented.
|
| I will credit the article for using examples that are still
| visually appealing today, even (especially?) the 2004 blog.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Which arguments did you find puzzling? Everything seemed pretty
| relevant to me
| zerocrates wrote:
| I'd say the big standout would be the section on having only
| a few fonts to choose from, odd both in the current context
| generally where there's now a paralyzingly _large_ number of
| fonts to choose from as a web designer, and also in the
| specific context of being presented on a site that 's clearly
| using webfonts.
|
| The Internet Archive's closest look at the original [1] isn't
| quite from the day of but it's probably the same styling: a
| classic "Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif" font stack.
|
| The grandparent comment called out the usage of still-
| appealing examples, but the original itself viewed in its
| original style is a good example as well, and really a better
| illustration of the post's point. Despite using a single
| "default" font, simple things like the choices of text width,
| line height, and differences in size, weight, and spacing of
| the headings have kept it attractive and readable.
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070628195031/https://inform
| ati...
| brailsafe wrote:
| Ah yes, quite a lot has happened in webfont space since
| then. Their original layout is a great argument for having
| a sense of grid systems and page layout, especially being
| long-before sophisticated grid css would come to browsers.
| BetaPictoris wrote:
| Is it just me or does the original look much better? I
| think it's the text size, but also the spacing of the new
| version just feels... wasted.
| creesch wrote:
| Interesting to see the original. To me, that one feels like
| a much clearer presentation of good typography. For
| example, in the "modern" version the first thing that
| crossed my mind is that ironically the quote at the start
| of the article isn't clearly presented as such. In the
| original it much clearer is presented as such.
| proc0 wrote:
| Not anymore, maybe back when static sites were common. Web sites
| now are applications with lots of interactivity. The interactive
| design is often lost because designers are mostly designing for
| static layouts, with interactivity falling lower in priority.
| This then becomes a bad experience with developers having to
| constantly fix interactivity issues that were born from lack of
| design and product specs.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| >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.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Interactivity is important if interactivity is important, and
| should be given the attention it deserves, but JavaScript
| people have always wanted to believe it's _always_ more
| important than the fundamentals of text-based information,
| which I 'd argue it rarely surpasses in importance.
|
| People like to conveniently forget that even if you're
| building a richly interactive thing that's better described
| as an application, all your buttons, labels, chart legends,
| street names, links, table data cells, blog posts,
| confirmation boxes, error messages, form fields, comment
| threads, settings screens, profile names, notifications,
| product specs, and many more components are going to be text,
| and should be treated as the venerable vehicle for
| information that text is. Sometimes it isn't as important as
| other aspects, but a great foundation in typography will
| allow for someone to produce great results with less
| resources.
| proc0 wrote:
| Typography is still important, but I'm saying interactivity
| is even more important yet still is a blindspot for most
| designers. You can imagine two websites, one with subpar
| typography but excellent responsiveness and interactivity,
| and the other with excellent typography but is slow and
| interactions are confusing or don't work perfectly. It's
| not hard to see interactivity wins.
|
| Many UIs are notorious for bad typography but are still
| successful because they are responsive and smooth. I like
| typography but it's useless if the site loads slowly or the
| navigation is not intuitive, etc.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I suppose you (or perhaps designers) are thinking of
| interactivity in the opposite order as I am, as though
| it's a sensible or a necessary step to position some
| possibly janky animation in-between the visitor/user and
| what they're trying to accomplish, and it's sufficiently
| high-risk as to actually cause problems. I initially
| couldn't think of how some piece of UI would actually
| ship even though it posed a risk to the user's
| experience, but now that I do think about it, it's always
| been a top-down decision, less that of an actual
| designer; usually it's a bunch of pointless dropdowns or
| sliders that just weren't given any thought, and
| engineers or designers were told to do it because 2 weeks
| gotta go fast gotta ship. There can be some really bad
| offenders out there, I've worked on fixing them, I just
| usually attribute that to pointless pressure to build
| _specific_ things, where implementation details are
| removed from the agency of their rightful craftspeople.
| proc0 wrote:
| 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.
| lazyvar wrote:
| (2006) An article about the importance of typography uses
| massive, unreadable font at 25px.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| And with ink traps in the title font.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Pretty sure it didn't use that custom font back then, and the
| iA swiss founder would never have done this. They seem to be
| focused on apps lately and probably had someone new try their
| hand at "modernising" the old website...
| mfru wrote:
| I think it is more readable than most pages.
|
| One of the few pages where I don't need to scale up at least
| one step in my browser.
| dkarras wrote:
| It is a bit ironic that the website has white text on black
| background which is no-no on screens as the very high contrast
| creates ghosting and eye strain / hurt for many people. Carefully
| read the text, then look at anywhere else and you'll see ghost
| lines everywhere for a few minutes. So the text should at least
| be gray-ish to decrease the contrast if you want to go that way.
| This works pretty well on paper, but sucks on screen.
|
| Whenever I see such content, I send them this link which
| demonstrates the issue in a fun way:
| https://www.ironicsans.com/owmyeyes/
| jwells89 wrote:
| I think this varies between individuals.
|
| In my case, it's not unusual for white on black to be more
| comfortably readable than the opposite, depending on ambient
| lighting, screen panel type, type of device, etc. As such I
| greatly appreciate it when sites provide a light/dark toggle or
| at least work well with reader mode, which I can tune to fit my
| needs.
| zerocrates wrote:
| That's a "prefers-color-scheme: dark" style: if your machine is
| set to light mode then it's black on white, well okay, very
| dark gray on very light gray. (Also the text in dark mode _is_
| slightly gray but it 's _very_ slight).
|
| I don't think it's totally crazy to present text like this to
| users who are advertising a preference for white-on-black
| (though of course there's an argument to be made about the
| difference between "dark" as a UI choice and a content
| choice... really this feels like something your browser should
| let you opt out of despite your OS colorscheme choice).
| dkarras wrote:
| Preferring dark mode does not necessitate presenting #f0f0f0
| text on #000 background. Lots of websites out there that
| present a proper dark mode when they sniff the preference.
| userbinator wrote:
| Turn your monitor's brightness down.
|
| Those of us who have monitors which aren't left at eye-
| bleedingly-bright defaults shouldn't have to suffer low
| contrast text (which is much harder to fix).
| smrq wrote:
| I find this argument unconvincing for the same reason that
| the answer to the musical loudness war isn't "turn your
| speakers down". When contrast is maximized 100% of the time,
| there's no room for emphasis.
| userbinator wrote:
| I find your argument unconvincing too, because having your
| monitor set to a comfortable brightness was the norm before
| designers ignorant of brightness controls started ruining
| it for everyone else.
|
| The "musical loudness war" is completely irrelevant and
| makes no sense in this context either. Turn your speakers
| down if your ears are hurting.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| 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.
| xigoi wrote:
| There is room for emphasis: bold text, colors, different
| font, ...
| mrob wrote:
| Printed text does just fine using maximum contrast all
| the time, and bold and italics for emphasis.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >The "musical loudness war" is completely irrelevant and
| makes no sense in this context either. Turn your speakers
| down if your ears are hurting.
|
| Recorded distorted sounds are still distorted regardless
| of your volume setting. Loudness war making people's ears
| hurt isn't solely due to the volume. If you can't tell
| the difference between piss poor mastering vs something
| properly mastered and being able to recognize them when
| you hear them is one of those "ignorance is bliss" things
| in life. However, once you can tell, you can't not hear
| it once it's present. The only way volume fixes it is
| when volume is set to 0.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Typography has a solution for emphasis that doesn't use
| contrast, and it's called _italics_. Use that.
| criddell wrote:
| So for your analogy, would you say the solution for
| compressed dynamic range in music recording would be for
| artists to use, say, guitar distortion or other audio
| choices for emphasis in music rather than playing with
| loudness?
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Text and music are two completely separate forms of
| medium with completely different conventions. Your
| insistence on comparing them is meaningless.
| dkarras wrote:
| Yeah, in my case that is not it. Turning the brightness up
| makes it significantly worse though, I agree.
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| I never have this problem, but it might be because I always use
| my monitor in the range of 15% to 30% of its maximum
| brightness.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Until pandemic, most of my time was spent in dimmed rooms like
| edit bays which is a common lighting condition for that type of
| space. The dark color scheme is pretty much the default for any
| software you'd expect to find in that environment. Since the
| primary type of UI that I create is also used by people in that
| industry, they typically have a dark background scheme too.
| Now, that I no longer work in those caves, the bright colors
| are taking some getting used to and I'm still not there.
|
| For you to say it sucks without saying "for me" at the end of
| it is just you assuming everyone has the same preferences as
| you. I can tell you from experience, this is just a bad belief
| to hold.
| xigoi wrote:
| The link you posted is exactly how I normally read every
| webpage - I have Dark Reader set up to make all text white on a
| black background. Light backgrounds make my eyes bleed and I
| actively avoid working with software that forces them on me.
| dkarras wrote:
| I am not talking about dark / light mode difference. I too
| prefer dark mode in everything I use. Dark mode does not mean
| highest contrast text on black background though.
| xigoi wrote:
| Yes, I am talking about pure white on pure black. I find
| gray on slightly darker gray hard to read.
| RuleOfBirds wrote:
| I have trouble caring about what someone says about typography
| when they've chosen abnormally excessive letterspacing which
| makes reading awkward and effortful.
| xnx wrote:
| 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.
| thrwy_918 wrote:
| what percentage of users would you estimate are interested in
| choosing or writing a user style sheet?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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 different scale factor? A phone
| with a non-iPhone screen ratio? Perhaps you dare use a
| browser that shows scroll bars by default? Good luck getting
| use out of any of those over-designed marketing websites.
|
| I use tree style tabs so my computer has a 1920x1080
| resolution, but not the entire width of the screen is
| available to websites. I've had to collapse the side panel
| repeatedly because some websites just couldn't deal with the
| idea that a _desktop browser_ had a resolution that wasn 't
| full width. I'll take on of those Motherfucking Websites over
| the marketing nonsense any time.
| velcrovan wrote:
| 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 point.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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...
| crispyambulance wrote:
| What percentage?
|
| I would estimate a percentage far closer to ZERO than even
| ONE percent.
|
| Something like 20% of users use adblockers and that takes a
| fair amount of effort for regular folks. So, right off the
| bat, we're talking << 20% as a starting point because it's
| much harder than using an adblocker extension.
|
| To be able to CREATE a user style sheet that can apply to
| arbitrary websites without making them look like ass would be
| very difficult. Unless, of course, one WANTS all websites to
| look like ass.
|
| I guess, somewhere, there's a nice stash of ready-to-go css
| that folks can apply (using developer tools or an obscure
| extension) on their browsers? I don't know. I never looked.
| But that would involving a lot of fussing I can't imagine
| normal folks doing that at all.
| Izkata wrote:
| "User agent" is the more important one. Allow the browser to
| deal with the system it's presenting on (mobile vs desktop,
| for example).
| jen729w wrote:
| That sounds _really boring,_ so I'll say no thanks.
|
| The web isn't just about the words. It's about the look and the
| feel and the imagination.
|
| Just like print was, and still is.
| mrob wrote:
| Fancy typography is the realm of magazines, not books, and I
| can't think of a single magazine that's stuck in my memory
| the way real books do. If you have to use fancy typography to
| make your text feel more interesting it probably isn't worth
| reading.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Have any web pages stuck in your memory like real books do?
| The web _is_ akin to magazines and not books.
|
| Nowhere in the article it talks about making it visually
| interesting.
| mrob wrote:
| Yes, but not any with typography like the article. I use
| custom CSS and Firefox's Reader View to disable a lot of
| design/typography.
| velcrovan wrote:
| The second sentence is true.
|
| The first sentence is completely unsupported.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| 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
| doing) easily create monstrous abominations that communicate
| nothing beyond "unprofessional" and scream "I have the aesthetic
| taste of a 3 year old".
| brailsafe wrote:
| True. Typographic scales, proportion, and a few other subjects
| would prove generally valuable for many.
| enjo wrote:
| One of the best programming lessons I've learned was actually
| an attempt I made to learn something about design. Typography
| (which deals quite a lot with the presentation of information
| hierarchies) is an essential skill in making code _actually_
| readable. It gives you a framework for thinking about how to
| draw a readers attention to the places you want and how to
| signal that it is important. Which you can do even with tabs
| and plain-text.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Beyond the choices of _what_ to do with them, word processors
| also don 't really try to educate or nudge users into _how_ to
| do things. "Typewriter"-type usage, where the user makes all
| their changes directly as they type or on small selections, is
| still the dominant pattern of actual user behavior when the
| system is really built on shared styles geared to allowing you
| to make document-wide changes all at once.
|
| Ignoring that system makes perfect sense in some cases, but the
| "magic" that Word and friends use to try to coax some of your
| input into styles is a constant source of frustration and
| confusion both for people who do and don't want to bother with
| styles.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| That's not even the biggest advantage of styles - they have a
| semantic meaning. Eg headings show up in Word's navigation
| pane or auto generated table of contents; or if you convert a
| word document into an epub using calibre and you used styles
| correctly then eg each top level heading will be a new
| chapter.
| Pamar wrote:
| _...get at least baseline training in typography and layout. It
| should be a short high-school course. The basic rules are not
| that hard._
|
| Can anyone suggest a concise book/course/video on this?
| nicbou wrote:
| https://practicaltypography.com/
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Yeah, just another niche high school course that everyone
| should follow, that's what our schools need
| blowski wrote:
| Indeed. Medium has wonderful typography, but it doesn't make
| me want to read them.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| RoyalSloth wrote:
| I don't get it why the Microsoft Word team didn't create a good
| looking default template that people could just use without any
| fiddling necessary. They had more than 20 years at this point
| to create something that looks pleasing out of the box, but
| when you check the available templates they are all an ugly
| looking mess.
| brailsafe wrote:
| As true then as it is now. It's rare, even with highly
| interactive applications, that text isn't a fundamental component
| of your website or application.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Good oppty to share https://every-layout.dev/rudiments/axioms and
| its use of a coherent typographic scale as the basis of
| fundamentally sound web UI layout.
| garrickvanburen wrote:
| To those god wishes to punish, he first teaches typography.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Those he wishes to drive mad he teaches kerning or keming
| depending on the type of madness desired.
| creata wrote:
| 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.)
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| 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.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I consider the reasonable range of body text font-sizes to be
| 16-20px, but I recommend 16-18px. (On small screens, you
| should exclusively use 16px; the larger values are for larger
| screens where it can be warranted and I would almost always
| recommend it.) This is what just about everything is
| calibrated against, so you cause trouble by going much out of
| this range.
|
| HN uses 12px. At 25% below the range, this is significantly
| undersized, and 120% scaling is about the minimum I can
| tolerate (though I don't find myself going up to 133% for
| some reason, which I might have thought I would do, but I
| decided I didn't like it).
|
| The site in question uses 25.3px. At 26.5% above my proposed
| range (and 40% above my recommendation), this is
| significantly oversized.
|
| If your eyes are straining at 70%, which reduces it to
| 17.71px, something's wrong, probably in your setup--because
| that's generally still at least 10% larger than all the rest
| of the text in your OS! (Linux/Sway: Firefox UI seems to be
| largely 14.667px with a little 15.4px, and this 14.667px
| seems visually to match other apps.)
|
| No, creata is correct. This site's text is very unreasonably
| and troublesomely large, and even shrinking it to 80% leaves
| it very mildly oversized.
|
| (The lead paragraph is 32.2px, which does reach the point I
| would happily describe as comically large. The quote a couple
| later is 21.85px.)
| Izkata wrote:
| 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.
| dchest wrote:
| My theory is that these designers use very large displays with
| very high resolutions and put them meters away from their eyes.
|
| Although, I'm not sure how they can read text on UI elements at
| the same time.
| vandahm wrote:
| 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, I
| think he has a demonstration with a photograph of a book in
| front of his monitor that illustrates this, and it looked
| pretty convincing.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| This argument is unsound: _CSS already takes that into
| account_. All of the units (px, pt, mm, in, _& c._) are, for
| screens, defined in terms of a _reference pixel_ , which is
| the visual angle of one pixel on a device with a device pixel
| density of 96dpi and a distance from the reader of an arm's
| length. https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-4/#absolute-lengths
| has some more explanation and diagrams that demonstrate
| what's going on.
|
| No, the reason why it's customary to boost the font-size a
| little on larger screens is because otherwise things start to
| look silly because you're using such a tiny part of the space
| available to you, and you have a larger viewport, so you can
| increase the size a bit without losing too much from the
| screen at any time. But if you take it too far, it starts to
| look silly for different reasons, because it's unreasonably
| large (and more importantly, inconsistent with common
| practice).
|
| (Also: 16px = 12pt.)
| Izkata wrote:
| > desktop monitor
|
| I guess that partially explains it, I'm on a laptop which is
| naturally closer than a desktop monitor.
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| 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.
| tarcon wrote:
| I read this article in 2006. Back then, it was set in the Georgia
| typeface at 16px font size. It looked great.
|
| Now it's 32px and a custom font with some ornamentation.
|
| For me the text appears to big to read without zooming out and
| the typeface looks medieval. If the purpose of typography is to
| "honour the content" (cf. Bringhurst), this does not seem to be a
| good example.
| defanor wrote:
| Seeing the title, I suspected that the typography will be messed
| up. And indeed, instead of my preferred configured font size, it
| is overly large and set in pixels, the line heights are higher
| than I would prefer as well (the font I use, Noto Sans, already
| has a pretty high leading). The situation with colors and margins
| is similar, to accompany that.
|
| And the reason I guessed it to be that way is because it is like
| that much of the time: once people focus on something that is not
| broken too badly, more often they mess it up, rather than
| improve. I think a much better advice would be just to not touch
| it. Maybe go roll your own crypto if you feel creative, but stop
| messing up fonts, colors, and the rest of interfaces: plain HTML
| is good and sufficient for most web publishing.
|
| Edit: though learning about typography still should not harm.
| Just applying it poorly--as done most of the time--may be
| annoying. Also same as with colors and adjacent design subjects.
| shadowbanned0 wrote:
| 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
| have typographers to turn them into visually appealing fonts.
| defanor wrote:
| > But if you are having one setting by the typographer and
| then choose to override them... yeah, it might be ugly.
|
| This can be equally viewed from the other (user's)
| perspective: I had the font set (along with a comfortable
| size), then apparently the website tried to override it,
| though I did not notice that. Now I had to both allow custom
| fonts and enable JS to see its intended font, and it is even
| less comfortable for me to read, adding serifs, while still
| having overly high lines.
|
| The reason I mentioned Noto is to better describe what I see,
| though perhaps it was unnecessary. That is, I saw it in a
| shape I liked a little more than the one it was intended to
| be in.
| kuhewa wrote:
| 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
| reason
| chrismorgan wrote:
| No idea what it looked like in 2006 (what domain did they
| use before ia.net?), but here's it in 2017: https://web.arc
| hive.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.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| I bought The Elements of Typographic Style over 20 years ago. I
| got about an hour in and never picked it up again. It isn't that
| the book is bad but typography isn't a topic that I want to self
| study. I think I could enjoy the topic in a classroom or study
| group setting but my mind just wonders to other things sitting in
| a chair reading about it.
| dusted wrote:
| Font selection should be left up to the browser vendor, and
| ultimately, the user, and not be overwritten or otherwise
| dictated by the website.
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