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Resilient Web Design

resilientwebdesign.com

44 pointsrobin_reala29 comments

For a book about web design, this surely is poorly designed. I can't resize the text with my built-in browser zoom to make it comfortable to read. Everything seems to be based on the size of the browser window.

It uses viewports units for type sizing. You can always turn off CSS

> You can always turn off CSS

Yeah but that kinda obliterates the whole point of reading something about good design.

Not trying to troll but good web design is about a lot more than CSS.

I know but I'm not talking about CSS, I'm talking about: try to read your own website before releasing it.

Out of genuine curiosity, why? What happened to using "em" or "rem"?

the site isn't loading so I can't say for sure, but I'd guess the intention is something like fittext.js. which makes sense in some cases for large type inside of hero units etc, but even then you'll want sensible containers, and for body text, this is a terrible idea. em/rem are fine.

There's a PDF available that makes it a little better.

https://resilientwebdesign.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads/Resili...

Stupidly unreadable. The rest must be bullshit if they can't get "readable on a desktop" right. It's literally the most important aspect of a web design.

Here's a screenshot for posterity: https://s29.postimg.org/5tx77lset/unreadable.png

How is this unreadable? Are you unable to read after a certain size?

I am not a fan of their design but it's not really unreadable.

It's unbearably hard to read. I might do it if my life depended on it. Otherwise it's nothing but torture.

eg: You need to scroll down a whole page after just 4-5 sentences.

Surprisingly easy to read for me. My vision isn't great so I prefer big fonts.

It seems to boost my reading comprehension as well.

Yeah but on any other website, you can make fonts bigger or smaller to accomodate anyone. This one won't.

Seems to work just fine with Firefox though. But I agree that the default font size is way to big.

Not on my Firefox. That's really weird. I almost understand messing up the font size on desktop, but making it unresizable is bad.

Looks like he read these comments, it seems to be resizable now (chrome). People can be pretty brutal here sometimes.

Why is pointing out that it is unreadable brutal? You know what's brutal? The h2 tag that covers half of my screen.

It isn't for me.

The design I don't know, but the hosting doesn't seem very resilient.

The design and font seem a bit. . large? I'm on a 27" monitor and I could stand back 10ft from this and still read it. Is this a thing now in Web Design? Do we need to make every font 36px and up?

My only other gripe is the jolting red and white hover states. You get this nice light blue that's pretty easy on your eyes then BOOM! super bright red hover.

I downloaded the PDF and will read later.

I think this was intended for mobile devices. It's formatted beautifully on my phone.

So... plenty of comments about font size. What do y'all think about the actual contents of the book? I've looked through it a bit and seems like an interesting concept--understanding why certain decisions were made in the history of the web, and extracting "resilient" design patterns out of those decisions.

I'm reminded of the first Feynman lecture, explaining how physics was discovered through a historical lens. I find it immensely helpful. Hopefully this web book is helpful as well!

I have to agree with some others here - on my larger monitor, the text is far too large to be easily read. The large spacing between letters and lines, combined with the excessively large body text is just causing eye fatigue, and I literally can't be bothered to pop an aspirin and keep going.

That said, it looks great on my phone.

Maybe there should be a maximum size on the text, or on the width of the site itself, to keep it in that "readable" zone. I want to read it at my desktop, but literally can't right now.

For example, changing the font-size calculations at widths greater than 50em could use 80vw instead of 100vw. At 60em go to 70vw, and at 75em use 55vw.

I believe the QWERTY layout origin mentioned in the first chapter is a myth.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-t...

I really like the design and the big font on my screen (1440x900). I find it a joy to read.

If there's a lot of text and the font is relatively small, I usually end up just quickly skimming the content or have to zoom the page a lot.

Resilient to what, reading?

It's a "history book" about web design, in case you're thinking it's anything to do with resilience and thus find it interesting.

TL;DR: React is the new Flash.

That font size makes it so hard to read on a big desktop.

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