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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see an actual measurement of this, if only a simple test. Two otherwise identical websites, one kerned by a professional designer, and one just using some default. Serve each of them to a random 50% of your customers and see which one converts more users or sells more widgets or whatever the metric is. Does the kerned version bring in more value than it cost to have the designer fiddle with the fonts?

My belief has always been that all design work should be measured and have to withstand the "does it actually provide value" test, since otherwise, how do you know one design is better than another?

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Just sit on the subway and browse the ads above your head. Some will be designed by a pro and the typography will be properly handled. Others will make you want to poke your eyes out if you examine them closely.

I'm going to say that yes, 100%, it provides value by creating a more appealing display. Frankly, it's embarrassing to have your brand displayed without the typography handled properly. If you don't see the difference then maybe you should do yourself a favour and not delve into the art of type because there is no turning back once you start noticing the bad stuff.

The question presented is not whether it makes a stylistic difference visible to those in-the-know but rather whether it makes a motivational difference visible in the actions of the mud-people. Those are two very different questions.

I worked for a multi-billion dollar finance company that worked primarily with middle and lower class people.

Our marketing department swore by bad design. Not just simple, accessible. Intentionally bad. They believed it grabbed more attention, and that their customers felt safe/found them more trustworthy.

When we tried out more polished marketing we had measurably fewer responses.

If it is achieving the intended impact, it's good design not bad design. I've seen looking at direct mail response rates that a very slick polished classy piece can underperform something more FUCKING LOOK AT ME MY LETTERS ARE BIG COLORFUL HERE'S CLIP ART OF A GUY HOLDING CASH!!!!!

That's still bad design. It may be good marketing though.

Not the same thing.

It's ugly, not bad.

Right. I've worked at a place where dozens of different variations of ad copy were tested live against random samplings of users (I'd guess this is what everyone in that business does by this point). Some designs are so much better than others that you can easily eyeball the $ difference just looking at the low-res dashboard. But we didn't go down deep to the level of testing kerning vs. not kerning, subtly different fonts/colors, etc. to see if they had any measurable effect. I think it would be an interesting study. You could probably program a computer to iterate and test by itself over and over until it arrived at the "objectively best" design.

Gotcha, blame my commute for the grudge.

I would be interested in a simulation based on big data or whatever, but I am passionate about typography as art.

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