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Comment by dragonne | Hacker News Reader

While we're discussing problems with web fonts, let's not forget the other common ailment: setting body text in a 300-weight font. Plenty of people don't seem to think to test web fonts on other OSes, as if font rendering were consistent. But what looks good on a retina Macbook Pro is completely unreadable on Linux or Windows. That light grey that produces a pleasing level contrast on a high-end IPS is nearly invisible on a three-year-old corporate-issue HP laptop.

Really, it's just the usual cycle of exuberance, overuse, and understanding that all web platform features seem to go through, but I for one am overjoyed to be able to fix a page's text via font blocking. For the light grey stuff there's always reader mode.

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Some things never change. I surf the web since 1995 and I've seen the designers and "designers" not caring about the readability since then, now it's really 20 years. As soon as it was possible to put the background images on the pages, almost every random page became unreadable unless you've turned off the images altogether.

Then the designers recognized they can reduce the size of the text to the unreadable sizes. They did that too, because it's about the design, they don't care about the text anyway, and the ants droppings look better on the page than these letters.

More recently, some claim that they read better gray text on the lighter gray background. I always used IPS screens and it was never readable. I guess these guys turn their brightness and contrast controls to 110% then wonder that the black text is not readable. Repeat after me: the readers don't set the screen like you.

And all these pages with long of nothing because their Njdxjdfj font is the only one which can present their glorious design. Yes it's annoying.

I'm extremely happy there's a reader mode in iOS and in Firefox. But guess what? The most annoying pages are almost by rule also not available in the reader mode. I wonder how they manage to achieve that. Do they tweak the page until the readers can't show it? Or is that just grandiose ignorance?

And remember these glorious Flash-only pages?

One thing I'm sure: whenever the technology gives some chance for some to produce unreadable pages, they will produce unreadable pages. The last 20 years were consistent with that.

My favorite old page, fully readable:

https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

Compare with the current home page of Bell Labs:

https://www.bell-labs.com

Is the goal of the modern design, when used as in this example, to convey information or to confuse?

The designer is certainly not the only responsible. The title of the page is: "Redefining Our Relationship with Information." Yes indeed.

It's about the user.

If your user is a developer or designer with a rMBP then you should design around their wants, needs, use cases, etc. If your user is a middle manager at a finance company using a Dell from 2009 then you have to design and develop to their use cases.

Very rarely will these two overlap; only on very very large products. As a designer I'm not going to forgo using a font or color pallete that my user finds attractive simply because a random person using antiquated hardware/software might stumble upon my product.

As a designer, if your work is not usable by people with disabilities you have failed at the most basic tasks you are supposed to do.

Read this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accessibility and repent

If the target audience for your website is so very limited that they can be approximated as one single guy browsing from a single specific machine, then that's...nice for you, but it's not actually applicable to pretty much anyone else.

This is such a bizarre response that I'm wondering if it's sarcastic or something. To a paraphrase you (but really not much IMO), there are only two types of people in the world: those who have rMBPs (in the same lighting and calibration your page was designed in, with the same eyes and brain you have), and those who don't. (And it doesn't even appear you were using these as two extremes with a spectrum in between, because you said "Very rarely will these two overlap.") Somehow, you know exactly which part your audience belongs to and what they "find attractive", and you don't care if they disagree, or might have been interested in your content but it's not working because they are on the opposite of the "rMBP binary" side you chose.

Even if some of this is true, thinking "very rarely will they overlap" seems so short-sighted.. you're just going to turn away possible users because you decided your product is niche enough that you can predict exactly what environment (electronic, biological, and physical) your user is viewing it through?

I mean, I knew the stereotype that designers are opinionated, but this is a whole new level...

it's not working because they are on the opposite of the "rMBP binary" side you chose

It's a losing cause. It's not just the person you're responding to, even Apple does the same.

I'm running OS X 10.10 on my desktop and it is OK, so I tried it on my non-retina Macbook Pro. But the overall appearance, including the fonts, was just "yeech". I'm not a graphic designer and so I couldn't put my finger on exactly what was wrong. But a bunch of fiddling around with fonts and Accessibility didn't help.

So I reverted to OS X 10.8 and everything is nice again. Time Machine made it so so so easy to revert.

I most certainly didn't say there are only two types of people in the world. My comment clearly focused on designing around the user. Your user is different than my user, etc. I simply supplied two common use cases.

It's also a matter of designing around net positivity. If 70% of my users respond positively to a design then I've done pretty well. 30% in most cases is a small number. That doesn't mean alienating and ignoring that 30%, but it also doesn't mean throwing out the approval of the 70%. It's a compromise. (I didn't think I needed to be so explicit in my first comment).

Larger products, let's say Facebook, even 1% is a million users. So of course they can't ignore them.

I've obviously struck a sensitive chord here with the HN crowd so I won't go any further.

The more general version of your argument makes more sense, but I still think you are taking for granted that you can know your users that well, and how much "your user is different than my user" really applies. You don't seem to account for the magnitude of how positively/negatively the user is responding. If 70% of your users rate it a +2 on a scale of -5 to +5, and 30% rate it -4, that would seem to meet your scenario, but is that really a good goal, to be barely tolerable to a "mere" 30%? Maybe I'm being fallacious here since my own argument is that you won't have data that good, but I mean it as an analogy for why I disagree with the idea of knowingly pushing a design that won't work for some users.

Around here at least, it's weird to bake the assumption of a non-large product into your design philosophy. You don't want to have a large, diverse userbase? Is your design actually defining who your userbase is, rather than the other way around? If you want that, we can't stop you, but it seems strange to us.

> Very rarely will these two overlap; only on very very large products.

This is the Kool-Aid drunk by designers who actually don't give a fuck about their users. 'rarely', 'very very large products'... this is the cry of the lazy, crappy designer.

From a marketing perspective, we kept getting really excited seeing screen resolutions rise and font rendering improve for our audience. Now designers can just design, not "for-web", which used to be a very restrictive medium compared to what could be achieved with a pixel editor.

We realize some strange folks somewhere are still running IE6, but they aren't the ones responding to our campaigns anyway.

Somewhere along the way designers forgot that design is not just about pretty things, but also being able to comfortably use the said things.

Or as they said ten years ago:

"Did you know your web page is unreadable in Firefox?"

"Yeah, but our analysis shows very few of our visitors use Firefox."

But really, it's the only sane way.

Sorry, my QA guy is not going to test with Konqueror just because you happen to like it.

I imagine my electric company sees low usage of Chrome- because their site doesn't actually allow you to log in using Chrome.

This is why people don't like marketers. It honestly doesn't even occur to you that there's a problem with e.g. screwing over vision-impaired users, because as a small minority not responsible for many ad click-throughs. "The right thing" begins and ends with money, and you don't even have enough moral compass to realize that normal people don't feel the same way.

You must not live in the same world I do. I get paid to show people messaging they want to see.

Do you get paid by vision-impaired users to represent them? Great! Do that.

And this nonsense about design ignoring the vision impaired is misinformed. Now that we're able to accurately represent content using the full spectrum of HTML, accessibility is better than ever. Most of the sites I build these days have very little ineffective syntax. Disable the stylesheet entirely, if you're into living like it's 1999, and you'll still be able to see the content.

You may not care for an ultramodern brand's style, but that only tells you one thing: it's not for you!

> You may not care for an ultramodern brand's style, but that only tells you one thing: it's not for you!

One of the reasons I minimize my use of web apps (e.g., Gmail) is because I got tired and frustrated with the re-styling every 6-12 months; where I was no longer comfortable just because it didn't look the same; and I was no longer efficient because it was all re-organized; and I was annoyed because I was having conscious thoughts about the interface, instead of just using it to get stuff done. (This happens to a lesser extent with desktop apps, but at least I can avoid updating, etc.) Did someone consciously decide their product was no longer for me, so they didn't care what I think? Will they care if their decisions make me stop using their product?

I'm hesitant to accept the opinionated, brusque ideas about design being thrown around here, but even if I did, they don't seem to account for the effects of evolving the product while the userbase stays the same. I get the idea of incremental progress, but can you seriously believe that every change is good and is worth the costs? Yesterday, we missed the mark with skeuomorphism, today we know we need to throw it all out, and then we will have achieved perfection!

See, this is exactly what I mean. You don't seem to be aware that it's possible for there to be a difference between "good design" and "maximize immediate profits." This is why shoddy clickbait is taking over the web.

Good design maximizes profits.

You seem to be unaware of the human element in all of this; designers are proud to create the best experience they can, developers are proud to implement it, and clients are proud to let it speak on their behalf.

You answer your own question, and emphasize my point with your perception of "shoddy clickbait" being popular. Obviously, for some reason, people like it. Who are you to say it should be eliminated?

So, again, if you don't like it, it's not intended for you.

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