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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I'd just once like to work with a designer that has heard of words longer than 5 letters.

Every. Single. Darn. Design I get completely ignores the fact that the texts inside them won't be built from nice little short words with EXACTLY the correct letter counts (especially when localized).

Which results in shit UIs like one I've just seen on Android where (in my language) the button literally just says "Tap to..." and every single label on a button is truncated and doesn't finish a word.

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I agree, but would expand that to all parts of the design dealing with variable data, not just text (think thumbnails, avatars, etc). It’s too common for designs to that were beautiful on the canvas to fall apart once brought to life in the actual product.

Some designers also don’t have a good grip on what’s actually feasible to engineer, adding in various details that in aggregate can bloat the time and effort required to build the design multiple times over.

When I was a tester first thing I’d do was fill every text box with Ws just to see what ran over. Good to remember as a dev now.

I've seen many cases of the opposite, where despite plenty of room, text is inexplicably truncated to leave a huge amount of whitespace instead.

> the button literally just says "Tap to..."

*taps button*

*Satan appears and claims my soul along with all my firstborns*

It's good to have a little mystery and excitement in life!

I always tell ppl to test their designs with German content. Usually the longest words, generally speaking, which breaks a very high % of "first passes" on designs.

You need to work with designers who are used to supporting localization. Try making a UI using Deutsch and tell me about spacing issues. :D

> Honestly, I'd just once like to work with a designer that has heard of words longer than 5 letters.

I blame lorem ipsum. And Latin.

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