Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Visually looks a little messed up. Could be improved IMHO paying attention to some standard typographic rules.

Do not use a mix of several fonts and sizes in the same article

Choose good fonts. I wonder why is so trendy nowadays to use the thinnest font available and put it in an low contrast gray tone. It puts a innecessary strain in the eye of your public

Cheap fonts have a badly designed character spacing. The same problem happens here. Some letters look more closer than other and this is plain wrong in typography. All characters must create an uniform word and all words must have clear boundaries.

Fix your line spacing. Needs more height here for the same reason.

Plan your design and take care of the flow of your text. Do not randomly displace the beginning of some paragraphs over the other paragraphs without a good reason. Split your page using some strong vertical lines. Not a vertical zigzag pattern.

I am personally grateful for every blog which does not go out of it's way to follow "standard typographic rules" because so many of them end up looking identical.

Editors have extensively tested what works and what not for thousands of years. You might notice that I didn't talk about the ideas expressed in the text. Is because the chosen format is too cluttered and distracting. I was expelled in the first two paragraphs and personally couldn't care less about what was written here. I'm not probably the only one.

The lack of knowledge (or care) about basic typography is particularly surprising among web page creators (one of the groups of people that produce more written texts currently). This hurts everybody in many unexpected ways. We enjoy gray text over white background for some reason, jumpscare videos playing suddenly when you enter a web page, diminutive fontsizes by default guaranteeing to damage your eyes, and too long lines of text that are just the incorrect way to do it (but nobody cares).

"I wonder why is so trendy nowadays to use the thinnest font available"

I am pretty much an amateur at making web pages, and after I used Garamond for something, I read an article about how terrible it is for the WWW because it's so thin and you should only use it for print. But I thought, hey, my phone has more resolution than early laser printers, so is this advice really still relevant?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com