Embracing Minimalism as a Web Designer | Hacker News Reader

Embracing Minimalism as a Web Designer

experimentgarden.blogspot.com

31 pointsNathanKP26 comments

"As mentioned earlier more people are using iPhones, net books, and other portable devices for viewing the internet. The future of internet browsing will probably involve smaller screens, and thusly larger fonts should, in my opinion, be adopted."

Really? Why don't you stop sizing everything exactly an use a relative measure. Surely it is the job of the device to chose how big a letter should be displayed. One of my biggest frustrations with the web is how long it is taking to get to a point where we can stop using bitmaps to build sites.

I didn't use bitmaps in the site design, only in the article. All the fonts (unless I missed a few) have sizes defined as a percentage so that the device can choose a base font size and I can modify it from there.

Just finished writing a minimalistic wordpress theme. The focus was to hide all the unwanted noise (categories, tags, rss buttons, ads etc) from the view and make the text highly readable.

Demo: http://clear.kera.la/2009/12/a-theme-for-wonderful-writers/

Ryan Tomayko's theme is even more sparing; his name is the only hyperlink above the comments. See http://tomayko.com/writings/rack-cache-announce

My initial idea was to do something similar - do away with everything other than the article title + text and push everything else to the footer, but then I thought that it would be a radical design decision (as far a blog is concerned).

Will try to clean up a bit more.

nice. i don't know if this is any help, but something i played with recently is making parts of a page invisible until you mouse over them. obviously it only makes sense with certain use cases, but you might find it helps reduce things further.

(my example - http://www.acooke.org/ - where the links bottom left are intended only for my own use, as "bookmarks"; also i don't claim to be a designer - i'm a programmer - so please don't be offended by my relatively unsubtle design compared to yours...)

Good idea. It makes sense in many cases. I will try that too.

BTW I am not a designer myself. I am a programmer.

Check out some of the new CSS3 properties like Opacity!

I like it overall, though it does seem a little bit too bright. Perhaps the text needs to be darkened a bit so that there is more contrast.

I think that my friend Steve has the best minimalist blog design that I've seen: http://dekorte.com/blog/blog.cgi

Very nice. But all those vertical alignments are bothering me. I think if he moved the text bodies of the posts to the left to align with the dates, it'd be better. Also, his posts are short so those titles and dates are dominating the page. Maybe making them smaller and making the titles the same shade of grey as the dates would help.

Related to the article but: Why is Blogger the red-headed step child of Google? I stopped using it recently because over the last 3 years it's barely changed. Posting a comment requires 3 page refreshes, 1 auto-scroll, and breaks the look of the website.

There are so many simple things Google could do to improve Blogger. Obvious things too.

The comment problem is template-settable -- you don't need to go to the generic Blogger comments form. Mind you, the documentation is a little on the opaque side, and one really needs to be interested enough to go through all of the tags. The CAPTCHA time-out issue is a bit of a problem for longer comments for us slow typists (or, I suppose, for deliberate thinkers), and the only real answer for including background images is to base64-encode them in data URI on the stylesheet -- the browser will give up before getting them from the associated Picassa album about half the time if you use a URL as a src. Since the stylesheet is part of the page (not cached), that means the images need to be kept small -- good discipline, perhaps, but it ought to be a choice.

The only real missing link I've run across is the ability to create honest-to-goodness static content, something that won't show up in the blog archive -- although there are values available in the latest template tagset that indicate that something of the sort is at least under consideration. (At the moment, there is no way to intercept entry generation in the archive menu-writing loop, although you can use content tagging to rip a full-length or abstracted entry out of the normal page run.)

For the website, I would recommend putting some of the non-content bits (links, buttons, login, etc.) on the side, not on the top. Studies have shown that reading is faster and more comfortable with narrower columns, and the 30-45 cm found in modern laptops is way too wide. There's nothing wrong with having a lot of vertical screen space though.

You know what I love? When some web designer makes my browsing area even smaller on my Netbook. I just love that.

21st century electronic systems can't even do fluid layout properly. How ironic.

Here's what you would have said if you wanted to be correct:

20th Century mark up languages are absolutely retarded for designing web pages and breed bad layout design.

Yeah, I know I'm going to get down-voted because people lurv HTML, but having had to whip it into shape lately this was totally worth it.

It's funny to see how HTML5 is so 21st century.

Fluid layout isn't a problem -- line-length is. Anything beyond about 50 ems is too long for most people to read comfortably, and multicolumn layout will only work effectively if a spread of content can be restricted to a single screen before scrolling becomes necessary (ever read a multicolumn PDF with a minuscule typeface?). One can easily float the major elements around so that screen size can be accommodated, but allowing the text in any one container to expand beyond a usable width is poor design by any standard.

The problem of scrolling for multiple columns can be solved by scrolling horizontally.

Believe it or not, horizontal scrolling is not obvious to users -- many (and by many, I mean a number verging on fifty percent) ordinary end users simply cannot see horizontal scroll bars -- and is therefore not a solution to anything, but a problem a designer should avoid creating in the first place.

Horizontal scrolling is a significant enough problem that Jakob Neilsen has seen fit to name it one of the top ten web design mistakes and include a prohibition in his home page usability guidelines. I can tell you from experience supporting corporate apps that the best way to hide something from users is to make it big, red and flashing, but make them scroll right to see it. Circles and arrows and a paragraph explaining that they have to scroll right to see the Egress are of no help at all; they have been conditioned to vertical scrolling only.

And that is besides the fact that mice only have vertical scroll wheels. (Unless, of course, you have the new Apple mouse that supports two fingered horizontal scrolling.) So horizontal scrolling is difficult people because they have to actually mouse over the scroll bar, click and drag. Once again the exception is the MacBook in which a two fingered scroll on the touchpad can horizontally scroll.

I think that is the real reason why people hate horizontal scrolling.

If there is only a horizontal scroll bar you can scroll with the scrollwheel.

That is a good point, and one that I had forgotten about.

I get the distinct impression you haven't done a whole lot of usability testing, and I get that because you're offering a lot of advice that I would have given before I started paying attention to real-world usability and accessibility issues. Being disabled gives one a slightly different perspective. Trust me, horizontal scrolling is a problem for most users, even if it's obvious to you, and having a footer in place to say "this is where the vertical page ends" just exacerbates the situation -- they see the page as unfinished and will hit the refresh button more often than they'll attempt to scroll.

I never understand why people invent horizontal scroll. It is very unintuitive and sucks. That's the reason I hate reading PDF on handheld devices.

Reading habits of human beings are linear, not two dimensional. Trust me.

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