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Comment by jolux | Hacker News Reader

I'd just like to say that I admire Matthew Butterick's creative experimentation with business models for web publishing and absolutely adore Practical Typography to the extent that I've purchased several of his fonts and intend to purchase Beautiful Racket as well. It can be hard to imagine that there's a world for type design on computers outside the formulaic mundanity and advertisement-laden nature of the rest of the web, but then you get brilliant stuff like Practical Typography and now Beautiful Racket and you can see the world we don't have in contrast to the one that we do...

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It would be nice for there to be a bit more institutional knowledge on how to get people to pay for your product among these experiments.

Too many times I see projects say they're not making much money from these sorts of efforts, but when I go to the project I can't even figure out how to give them money! LWN is a prime example of lost opportunities (count how many steps it takes to go from "see subscriber link" to "be subscribed")

Personally, I'd throw something in the footer of every page of this book to link to a payment page. Make it easier for people to give you money after reading something interesting! Nagware might be annoying, but "this book is not free", right?

EDIT: Just went through the LWN subscriber flow. It took me... 10 steps? to get subscribed. I've dropped out of this flow before

In particular "this book is not free" while giving the whole thing away really emphasizes the dissonance you have to deal with when exposing yourself like this but it does so transparently and unpretentiously, I think.

Well I think it's mostly a case of deciding how much of a priority it is and how that's reflected in the overall design.

As you say, if you make easy for people to pay you, more people will pay.

Ease, I think, is a function of the quality of offering, i.e how good it is such that people will more readily part with their cash, and the actual ease of making a payment.

If you have great content and people want more yet the path to subscribe is tucked away so no one can find it, people won't pay (or can't in extreme cases).

If your content sucks, including devaluation via aggressive pushes for payment, I don't think people will be so keen to pay.

That said, I think more people tend to pay for the latter. Your get rich in 30 days with a pay now button every other paragraph and huge discount-that-isn't-a-discount is a prime example.

Maybe I'm naive, but I doubt specifically saying "don't pay me just $5" will increase his ability to make money. I do enjoy his snarky tone, but seriously, telling people to either pay $39 or just use it for free doesn't make much sense at all.

I don't know. It looks non-functional and ugly to me.

https://i.imgur.com/DmPKqhM.png

This is in contrast to something like nytimes.com which is really well designed.

Are you using Firefox? I see the same black box in Firefox too (which is actually an SVG inside an <img> tag), but in Chrome, it renders fine: https://imgur.com/a/NdvKN

I get the same thing in Firefox

yep. ff/lnx here, all good.

It looks like the SVG's style block[0] applies a black background to the svg element:

    svg {background: rgb(1.0,1.0,1.0)}

which fails to render in chrome due to the floats but renders fine in firefox. If set to white or removed entirely, it will display correctly in Firefox.

0: http://beautifulracket.com/img/polboxes16.svg

>It looks non-functional and ugly to me.

Non-functional and ugly? I'd say this is subjective, but I find this assessment objectively wrong.

It's complete accessible, and totally functional for what it does -- present a series of sections and display code examples. And it's also quite obviously well designed from an aesthetic perspective.

(There's no black box in the actual site in Chrome, but even with the black box, it's a totally fine functional design).

As for the NYT, it looks like a compromise between looking like a print newspaper of yore, a portal of slightly less yore, and a modern news website cramming everything in the same start page.

I was responding to a post about design, so this reply was about design.

Yeah, it's a subjective opinion. Something looking good is also an opinion.

What I mean by non-functional is that the attempt at design was non-functional on my browser resulting in dead space and unattractive design.

Since this book is about programming, it already sets a precedent for potentially pretty but non-universally-working solutions. Something I personally try to avoid as much as possible.

Other issues with the design is huge unattractive margins and the main page containing almost no information when first loaded.

Honestly, this all wouldn't normally bother me as there are tons of books whose online sites have OK at best design. And maybe it's a great book, but complimenting it on design specifically seems wrong.

>Other issues with the design is huge unattractive margins and the main page containing almost no information when first loaded.

"Huge unattractive margins", or use of ample "negative space", has long been a staple of the design vocabulary. Nothing inherently unattractive about it.

If what you want to say fits in a small space, don't make it take over the screen, and don't try to cram every level of information on a single page.

And it's the opposite of the overly busy, migraine inducing NYT website you mentioned as a good example of web design.

The layout is good, but the "grey on light grey" thing is not very visually accessible.

Is that huge ugly black box the result of not loading images or a defect in your browser?

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