It's impossible to separate the psychological effect of the typeface from the effect of the colour changes.
I'd like to learn something from the content of this article, but I suspect that I'm likely to learn the wrong thing, due to bad experimental design.
However, I agree with the parent post: I don't think this particular article is very good at all. The colours and text shadows distort the presentation. Worse, many of the later images are textbook examples of why you don't normally mix lots of fonts together on the same page. I think the author is trying to do too much with wide variations in fonts, while ignoring related tools like whitespace that might do the job better.
Christian Heilmann - http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/10/11/local-storage-and...
Bruce Lawson, Remy Sharp - http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/09/23/html5-the-facts-a...
Alma Hoffmann - http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/09/14/finding-alternati...
Paul Boag - http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/09/06/fight-the-system-...
Rachel Andrew - http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/07/19/how-to-use-css3-m...
Thomas Giannattasio - http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/11/02/the-ails-of-typog...
They are all experts in what they are writing about. The focus on Smashing Magazine is not design theory, but rather insights from practice, learned and shared by designers and developers out there. And yes, sometimes we do mistakes, but we always clear things up and improve the articles.
Also, we always welcome feedback and constructive criticism, and we would love to hear what you think we could do to improve the quality of Smashing Magazine's article. Thank you for your time.
Vitaly Friedman, editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine
Smashing Magazine covers a wide range of topics without necessarily going into depth in any one of them. I'm sure this is a function of wanting to drive traffic from reddit and the like. Understanding and learning takes time which isn't the kind of thing that leads to quick upvotes on the big social media sites. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, merely that this leads to a certain type of article.
Nobody learns to be a rock star developer by merely cutting and pasting code that comes up in a Google search. They work at it through experience, good books, and working with smart people. Design is the same - you can do the equivalent of cutting and pasting some rules, but to become a good designer there's a learning process.
I suggest having content such as a series of articles on one particular aspect of design, leading the reader from fundamentals to more advanced concepts. These articles are unlikely to be quick hits on the social networks, but they create more long-term value that keeps people coming back.
That aside, I think it would benefit Smashing Magazine's brand enormously if you resisted the temptation to run the "N beautiful pictures of Y" articles. No doubt they're quick hits for social media, but they come at the price of diluting the value of Smashing Magazine.
Please do check Smashing Magazine and its recent articles. We have changed a lot, and we are aware that this is probably a long process, and we are willing to get better and become more useful and relevant for the design community. Comments such as yours help us find the right direction and stick to it.
For instance, we created an experts panel where we invited experts of various fields to review articles published on Smashing Magazine before they get published. Every expert gets paid for his/her review. We would love to have you as a reviewer in our expert panel, to improve and maintain the high quality of the articles. Are you interested? Or maybe you or some other readers of Hacker News would like to write a rebuttal, explaining what's wrong in the article and what the real "proper" rules are? We would love to publish it on Smashing Magazine. We really want to help out the community. It was never about just pumping some (good, bad or average) content out there, it never was. We want to publish high quality articles, and only high quality.
I like the idea of having a series of articles on one particular aspect of design, and we've had such series in the past, and they usually work well. So I will definitely keep that in mind.
Thank you, matrix, I truly appreciate your time and your feedback.
— Vitaly Friedman, editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine
In that case, just as a friendly note, you might like to consider whether your "How to become a Smashing Magazine Author" page really says what you mean to say. For example, it starts with:
"Who can become a Smashing author? You. However, you need to have experience as a blogger or an author."
and it asks explicitly for URLs to existing articles/examples.
Personally, I have an interest in many subjects you cover (and do some of them for a living for various companies) and I participate in various on-line forums under my real name so I suppose you could see my writing there. However, I don't run my own design blog or publish books on the subject. I would imagine the same is true of many other people reading this discussion on HN. Your post here suggests that you would like to hear from those people if they were interested in writing for you and had relevant experience to share; your guidelines on your web site suggest otherwise.
Thank you for that. I think you have done a great job overall going in this direction. I loved http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/18/the-beauty-of-typ... posted earlier this year. I understand it's impossible to make every single article aim for perfection but now that you have raised the bar for yourself and we know about it, you have no choice but to meet it every single time.
The first thought in my mind when reading the current article was how the color difference between left and right slides affected my perceptions and hence completely negated the subsequent analysis. For a second I actually thought it would be funny if I made a parody article and switched the left and right slides and justified it with copy-pasted text from your own article.
I love typography and I try to learn more about it any time I get. But unfortunately, despite reading the entire article, I left away feeling like I learnt nothing. It's hard to say exactly why but just compare the current article with The Beauty Of Typography and you'll see what I'm trying to say here.
The truth is that reader's expectations are permanently increasing and sometimes it is really difficult to meet these expectations because every reader has different expectations and requirements for our articles. You can't please everybody, and we can just try to make sure that the vast majority of readers finds a piece useful and/or interesting. We try to do our best to keep the high quality level, and the amount of editing work for every single article hopefully speaks to that.
I understand what you are saying regarding the color difference in the examples, and it would be more correct to keep the background color the same, but I truly do not think that it would change the choice of typefaces a lot. We have carefully considered the typefaces and how they work together regardless the background they are on.
Also, I found quite many useful practical tips in the article, which is why it was published in the first place. But I can see that some descriptions are more general and could (and should) be more precise and concise. I will certainly keep your remark in mind for the next articles.
That's not exactly true. In fact,that's how many developers get going - merely copying and pasting code, but then later analyzing and tweaking it, and making it part of their vocabulary. Copy first, understand later.
Look at the model for classical painting atelliers: year 1: clean brushes. year 2 - 6: draw copies of the master's work. year 7: assist with minor painting duties
I once did a study on the top guitar players from several genre's from jazz to fusion. Without exception, every single one of them learned to play by copying (transcribing) solos from their favorite musicians. Later, they learned theory.
Thellonius Monk said "writing about music is like dancing about architecture". There is only so much you can say, even if you can say something useful. Sometimes a picture is really worth 1000 words.
I'd like to encourage people who might post more HN links to articles on graphic design, typography, usability, etc. that have real depth. Clearly a lot of people who contribute here work in related fields, so I suspect there would be enough interest to justify highlighting good content. I just don't want another five linkbait articles parroting the differences between en- and em-dashes as if that sort of detail is what typography is really about, or another ten that start by explaining a colour wheel and then parrot trivia about what each colour "means" without giving any useful examples or practical discussion about how to use that knowledge to do something better.