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Comment by jasonkostempski | Hacker News Reader

The only reason I read even a few lines of this was to see if the layout was supposed to ironical. It wasn't. I don't know what was going on with my scrollbar but they managed to jack it up better than any site I've ever been to.

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Agreed. Light grey text on a royal purple background isn't great, but it could be worse; it could be burnt orange on that same purple. Wait, it has that too.

And 3/4 screen ads. And animated images. And scrolljacking And autoplaying videos (something they argued against themselves). What a disaster.

I keep oscillating between "this is literally the most tone-deaf thing I've ever seen on the web" and "this is an utterly unprecedented new sublimity of metapresentation".

Not to mention the forced tiny horizontal width of the actual content. I have a 27" monitor and the text was constrained to a ~4" strip down the center of the page.

Indeed, the web looks like shit.

Wait, it's not ironic? I thought it was like Web Pages That Suck. Where the layout was bad because you 'don't expect to read about bad websites on a well designed one' or something.

Huh, guess this is a serious effort.

It's not intentionally ironic. Whatever is going on in design right now is a bit perplexing. I have personally found Eli Schiff's insight useful in parsing it. He explains it in terms of designers' self-hatred, lol.

Here was his comment when The Outline launched -- https://twitter.com/eli_schiff/status/805775141825290241

This is "infinite scrolling" where content come and go as you scroll for better performances. On a good implementation, the scrollbar characteristics can be made to look fine and stable though.

I've actually been told that the graphic design of The Outline is supposed to be the cool feature that gets people coming back to the site. Which is weird, as it's... awful.

Is ironical a word?

It's a string of letters that convey a meaning, so yes, it's a word. It also has the blessing of being listed in most dictionaries.

Both forms, ironic and ironical are valid and in casual settings tend to be used interchangeably. In a more formal sense, one would say a work that uses irony can be describe as ironical, whereas the events themselves are ironic.

It is. "ironic" was a French loanword, but when it was shoehorned into English, forms like "ironically" made the redundant addition of "-al" natural for some. Both have been in common use for many centuries.

I'm still far more used to the terser "ironic" myself though. "ironical" seems alien and strange to me.

I thought ironical was the word that describes what one is doing when one makes an ironic statement?

That is to say when someone says something ironic, they are not themselves ironic, rather they are being ironical.

Apparently so:

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5015/ironic-vs-ir...

It's the ironic way to use the word. Using a word to sound smart but using it incorrectly and mispronouncing it, is ironic. I think.

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