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Comment by jalfresi | Hacker News Reader

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jalfresi

"If everything that is text was just black you would loose the hierarchy"

Nonsense. Type weights exist for this, as does size, grouping, placement etc.

Typography IS hierarchy.

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Also relevant is the typography concept of "color": http://practicaltypography.com/color.html.

That website is currently not loading for me.

Ah it seems to redirect HN users to [0]. Sorry, it worked in my search so I didn't know about that. You can just search for "color typography" and read an alternate link or try clicking into that one from Google/the address bar mode since it seems to rely on reading the referrer. On a sidenote, the whole book is great so if you do read it and find it useful, I would pay for it.

[0]: http://practicaltypography.com/graylist.html

That's one of the most exciting things I've seen all week. Thank you very much. I'm sure I'll enjoy reading it.

When I wrote the comment it wasn't even redirecting -- it was plain not loading at all. It's loading now, albeit with the redirect you mentioned. Guy's got a point in a way and he's free to do as he wishes with his own content of course but still I don't like those kinds of redirects, since I am not planing on reading the whole book anyway, just the particular page you linked. Also, if he wanted me to pay for the book, he should provide me with an ePub copy of the book. If I don't get a copy then it is absolutely certain I'm not paying for it. I don't read books on my monitor, I read them on my eReader, and only in DRM-free ePub. Author of the page is never going to see this comment but I felt like expressing this anyway.

Sure but that doesn't mean it's used as that.

To echo your point, the screen shots from the original article bare this out. The new App Engine interface does express information hierarchy through type, but it does so badly. The side menu uses all three of spacing, text size and colour to indicate hierarchy, to the point where the lower-level items are nearly illegible. Skimming it, I got the feeling the designer was saying "You don't need this", rather than "You won't need this often" or "Y is a specialisation of X" (which was probably the intent).

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