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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

sourcehut isn't minimalist, it's plainly disfunctional.

The homepage is basically a book you have to read from top to bottom, without any content structure your eyes can hook up to to correctly extract important information.

Hacker news is what i'd call minimalist, but your eyes can immediately identify the various content blocs and functions.

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The lack of any vertical rhythm or spacing, at least in mobile, is atrocious.

> The homepage is basically a book you have to read from top to bottom, without any content structure your eyes can hook up to to correctly extract important information.

Are you talking about this page? https://sourcehut.org/

It seems like the opposite to me, each feature has a big heading that you can quickly read to get an overview of all the features, with smaller, more detailed descriptions below.

The information hierarchy is unclear because they did not use best practices in design. As the other commenters said, you have to read it like a book. A better site would have larger, bold headings with darker text than the body text. There would be more padding between the sections. There would be a jumbotron at the top that identifies the top 1-3 reasons for me to use this site, so I can understand in 5 seconds if I want this service and don't have to spend 3 minutes reading the entire text.

There's some pretty low-hanging fruit on sourcehut's landing page (like vertical spacing) but it really does take 5 seconds to learn why to use sourcehut. It's right at the top with a bold header that says "welcome to sourcehut" and a literal bullet list of reasons.

i had to read your comment to understand that banner wasn't the user registration banner. Because of the huge input fields on the right, and the same gray background, i had the feeling this whole section was popin in for user registration.

This is an example of a total misunderstanding of one of the most basic graphical design principle : you don't group together information that is not related.

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