Comment by CMay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CMay | Hacker News Reader

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Not sure why it matters that it's an open source project homepage? If treated as a webpage in general among all other webpages, the design isn't that special. It's not awful, but pushing a ton of deep blue in your face would not be considered good design by many.

I appreciate the minimalism they're going for, the thick borders and that they aren't afraid of color, but the blue is too much. This trend of one-page fancy-scrolls grew from catering to mobile devices. On average, it seems like their only goal is to avoid bad design on mobile and ignore all other devices. These giant scrolling minimalist pages are often bad design on desktop, mediocre design on tablets and ok design on mobile.

Do not forget that webpages at their core are about information design. I just had to scroll almost 8 pages in order to read a few paragraphs and most of the paragraphs didn't have the information that was interesting to me.

The page that really had the information I wanted was hidden behind a "Contribute" button which makes no sense and you have to scroll all the way back up to the top to get to if you've read down to the bottom.

The style it's going for is fine, but I'm not sold on it being good information design for all devices, if any. :/

> pushing a ton of deep blue in your face would not be considered good design by many.

Sorry to see that you're getting downvoted. Backlit, saturated colors like that are really unpleasant for some people. Designers should take that into account. Same goes for animation on pages that are meant to be read (another trend which is definitely not accessible for many people).

(Other than the color intensity, the page is great.)

Everything is unpleasant for some people. Anyway, is good design that which offends the least number of people? I can't agree with that.

The measure of good design depends on the purpose of your content. In some cases it may very well be a design that offends the fewest.

Would you argue that accessibility is not worth spending time on, because it only affects a relatively small number of people?

Accessibility or " really unpleasant "? You are moving the goalposts.

There is a gray area in there. Animation is an accessibility problem, even when the result is only that the user can't use the website. Colors less so, unless the contrast is low. Material Design has had really bad influence on both animation and color saturation practices over the past couple of years so I tend to group them together.

* https://www.webaccessibility.com/best_practices.php?technolo...

* http://simplyaccessible.com/article/animations/

> Do not forget that webpages at their core are about information design.

I believe your are confusing web pages with graphic design. A graphic designer's job is based in information architecture. Webpages were originally designed for simple document sharing, however since '96 - we still have some simple documents, but we also have non-trivial games, and extremely complex applications that run businesses.

This open source project happens to be for the mid to latter, so it seems appropriate then that they actually demo some of the features of the library. Also, one could make the argument that a beautiful design can inspire another developer to make something beautiful. API's are often pretty dull. I find this design to be delightful.

BTW, you can always use shortcuts provided by your browser/OS. Tap in the header on mobile, press "Home" on Windoze, and Cmd+Up on Mac.

> I believe your are confusing web pages with graphic design.

I'm not. I remember the times of Bulletin Board Systems you had to dial into and then the transition to the popularity of the web. It has always been about navigating information. Sometimes the information is art. Sometimes the information is the interactivity itself. Most of the time the information is text. Once people realized that packaging was important, just like a hardback book with a wonderful cover and table of contents versus a manuscript-like stack of impenetrable pages, it became a matter of business. Nobody says a book can't have pop-up cut-outs that unfold when you open a page, but whatever the quality of a book is, it can be measured.

What I'm saying is that, I can appreciate what this webpage is doing, but I also would not say that it is a fantastic example of web design.

> Also, one could make the argument that a beautiful design can inspire another developer to make something beautiful. API's are often pretty dull. I find this design to be delightful.

My complaints with it should be possible to fully resolve while maintaining every one of those qualities you like about it.

> BTW, you can always use shortcuts provided by your browser/OS. Tap in the header on mobile, press "Home" on Windoze, and Cmd+Up on Mac.

I am aware of that, but often people are navigating mostly with the mouse and requiring the user to move their hand away from the mouse isn't user friendly. There is a human in front of the machine. It isn't just about the capabilities of the machine. Proper design is about the complete stack, including the biological part of it.

I don't mind if other people like a page. My concern is that people take it as excellent design that should be replicated, including its faults. If someone reads these comments and appreciates that, maybe it will do some good.

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