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Show HN: Making Tumblr Work vs. Medium & Svbtle

jfornear.com

25 pointsjfornear23 comments

You probably can't buy Minion Pro and use it via @font-face; most professional fonts are sold with licenses that forbid that, because it makes a perfect-fidelity instantly-usable copy of the font available to anyone who visits your site.

For a similar reason, most of the HF+J fonts either require sIFR or image replacement, or for you to be cool enough (like Kottke) to get to use their beta web font service.

Typekit, which this author is supposedly already using to get Minion Pro on his websites, is equivalent: in the end it uses @font-face to download the font (at least, according to TechCrunch).

> Typekit lets users choose the fonts they want to use (the number of fonts per site depends on the price plan chosen) and embed them using the web standards compliant @font-face CSS declaration and a bit of Javascript.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/11/typekit-launches-hopes-to-s...

I was under the impression that they simply wanted to be able to charge a yearly subscription to use the font like this, which is apparently how Typekit's model works.

Adobe thereby doesn't directly license you this font for web font usage: instead it works through a couple partners, including Typekit, to distribute it.

> With help from one of our trusted web font partners you'll be able to deliver type to your website that is searchable, editable and viewable without compromising the high performance and selection that you demand for your viewers.

http://store1.adobe.com/type/webfont/info.html

Adobe is working with another partner, however: WebINK. In Adobe's Web Font FAQ, there is a question "what if I hand code my website", which seems to indicate WebINK lets you just work with @font-face directly.

> With WebINK, web fonts are integrated using the standard CSS @font-face rules. If you are familiar with the basics of CSS, you can easily integrate Adobe Web Fonts into your website with Extensis WebINK.

http://www.adobe.com/type/webfont/faq.html

The answer, thereby, to how expensive it would be to license this font for @font-face use seems to either be "exactly what you already are paying Typekit" (as/if they use @font-face) or whatever WebINK charges.

From WebINK's website, they seem to charge by the number of unique visitors per month; their tiers are $20/20k, $50/80k, and $120/200k, with a "contact us" if you are expecting to get many more users than that.

http://www.webink.com/pricing

(I know about some of this, because the small college I went to uses Minion as the official font for its title, and I was helping them out with a website redesign a while back.)

http://store1.adobe.com/type/webfont/index.html

Thanks for clearing this up.

I'm down with the exhaustion with the startup cool kids too. Creating a Svbtle alternative isn't all that hard so I don't have much to say about that but I just want to say I like the sentiment and I agree that someone will come out of nowhere to win the post-Tumblr era.

Also, I'm one of your first few paragraphs you called Georgia a sans-serif font. That's wrong. Georgia is a serif. Serif fonts have the little stylized decoration dealies on the ends of the lines (man that is a really inarticulate but you know what I mean) kind of like, well, Georgia and Times New Roman and such. The sans-serifs are the ones like Helvetica and Arial. You seem to be a bright guy but among a lot of web savvy people, especially designers and developers, a rookie mistake like that can tota Ly discredit you. Just edit that real quick and you're good to go.

Anyone who ever tries to build any kind of collaborative publication online with any kind of voice is going to have to be selective about who writes for them, and is going to run into this "cool kids" stuff. You need to get over it. The very notion that you'd be embittered about not being able to blog with someone else betrays a naivete about what's important and what's not.

What, you're not one of Dustin Curtis' cool kids? Well, neither is Paul Graham, or, for that matter, William Vollman. I'm guessing neither is fuming about it.

Stop acting like it's a personal slight that Curtis doesn't have you writing for his project. It's not. Not writing at Svbtle says nothing about you at all. The only thing that does: complaining about not writing at Svbtle.

Thanks, fixed that - dyslexic moment or something.

There is something extremely tasteless about ripping off another site's design, right down to meaningless stylistic choices like the color of anchor links, and the use of circular avatars beside post titles. Instead of approaching the design from the perspective of wanting to look like one of the "startup-cool kids" (which is beyond me why that would matter), why not create something original that suits your needs?

To put it another way, if all Svbtle and Medium end up being is "minimalist" blog templates, they'll be abject failures. Why take inspiration from their least meaningful aspect?

He would have used the other site directly but they won't let him. So he reverse-engineered something that worked for him.

>> ...approaching the design from the perspective of wanting to look like one of the "startup-cool kids" (which is beyond me why that would matter)..

You're right. Don't people realize that once everyone's doing it, it's not cool any more?

When content and substance is not important to the observer, the only way thing you see in other popular blogs is the design.

It's easier to copy someone's design than their writing, research, and analytical skills.

I see the same thing in bloggers themselves. They want to change things up, and short of broadening their horizon and immersing themselves in some literature and material that could help them pursue what they like to write about, they ... redesign the website. Because that's the only parameter to a good blog in their equation.

It's like re-arranging the furniture on the Titanic.

Blue is the default color for hyperlinks. I've had a circular avatar on my site for 2+ years.

Sorry, there's something blinking in the top-left corner, annoying enough that I won't finish reading the post.

It's an animated GIF. Press the escape key and it will stop. edit: I guess this only works in FF?

It's been a requested feature in WebKit forever, and afaict nobody is really opposed to it, but nobody has stepped up to code it either.

WebKit bug: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23945

Chrome bug: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=3690

I'm going to finish reading, but it really is a UX nightmare. Terribly distracting and annoying :(

Since I don't want to be one of those HN posters that's negative about everything, I hope jfornear will take this as constructive criticism that removing the animation (or making it something less jarring) would improve readability :)

Its worse, there are two 'blinking' elements on this page. It looks like a myspace profile from back when <blink> was still a thing.

I totally disagree with the "never go black" sentiment. For non-Retina iOS devices, legibility is going to be directly harmed by non-black characters.

With Retina, you can go with whatever you want for decorative reasons, but devices with poor DPI suffer for it.

I think you'll find that a lot of websites don't use "hard black" (#000000). There's a perception that hard black text on a hard white background is the most legible combo, but in practice this can actually appear a bit harsh to some.

Even on non-Retina devices, as long as contrast isn't weakened too much, lightening the text can result in a softer, more appealing reading experience. (See most the way most "read later/readability" services format articles).

FTA: "Try not to make the column too wide on desktop or it will be too hard to read because your eyes have to travel too far horizontally."

Personally I found this page incredibly annoying to read. I have to scan down with my eyes constantly due to the crazy font size, the large spacing between lines, and the limited width.

I actually feel my eyes moving, processing every word as a result of the large size limiting my ability to process the content. The outcome is mental breaks between reading words which destroys the fluidity of the content.

In short: terrible typography in my opinion. Granted its a single opinion and I may be an outlier but between the flashing gifs and the typesetting I would never have read all the way through this unless I had the intention of commenting about it's poorness.

Some of that choppiness could be due to my writing. Readability turns posts into a similar layout so the readability should be close. I will continue to make tweaks so hopefully it will get better.

My blog (http://rmenez.es) uses a variant of Syte (https://github.com/rigoneri/syte) hosted on Heroku. It looks great and uses Tumblr as a CMS. I highly recommend it.

So are there any similar alternatives ? I really like this one but apparently the author deleted it.

vnknown.com

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