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Comment by armandososa | Hacker News Reader

I'm tired of people citing Khoi Vinh’s Web Site as the best web design in the world just because it's simple, typohraphical, monochromatic, and grid-based.

Face it people! if all the internet looked like this it will be boooring, not beautiful. It's part of subtraction's aesthetic and hardly works anywhere else.

I love Khoi's site, but I simply can't stand any other that uses his theme (http://basicmaths.subtraction.com/) because they look so dull, impersonal and pretentious.

Where's the David Carson of this generation?

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I would rather be bored by the design and amazed by the content than vice versa.

I'd prefer to be amazed by both.

Not only that, but Basic Maths makes assumptions about the size of the rendered text which aren't universally true.

On my display, that means you get horrible artifacts like the words in the "Information Graphics" tag at the top overlapping each other.

That's not good design. That's ugly and non-functional. The same is true (in fact much more so) of Vinh's own homepage.

HN, for all its plainness, is much better designed.

Agreed. Most theme designers ignore the different scenarios under which their theme will be used. Most theme shops optimize their demo installations so it looks perfect, only to disappoint the buyer when it's installed.

Is that the theme designers fault, or the person deploying their theme?

In the case of Basic Maths, there's examples of it on the designer's own demo page, depending on your browser settings.

Some people might say this is the user's fault for overriding the original font choices.

I'd say not all fonts are pleasant to read on all machines (except Macs where they generally all come out nice), and expecting the user to stick with ugly aliased ones for the sake of your layout is unprofessional :-P

The article is from 2006, man.

I agree, it's all a bit flat. Everything gets the same weight. It the design equivalent of over-engineering; you don't know where to start.

Face it people! if all the internet looked like this it will be boooring, not beautiful.

If all the internet looked like any one thing, it would be boring.

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