Designer as Writer | Hacker News Reader

Designer as Writer

stasaki.com

39 pointsomarchowdhury13 comments

I agree with the other comments about the article being difficult to read. But kudos to the author for taking the time and effort to put their words into practice and attempt to make an interestingly designed piece of writing.

But if we overdesign our writing, it becomes extremely hard to read as this one.

Design must be subservient to usability. It was painful for me to scroll, so much so that I gave up. It may have been acceptable on a wide desktop, but his article was so janky on my 2020 iPad that I had to stop reading.

It is bad on a wide desktop as well. The copy font is too large and could use more space between letters. The font size should have been capped.

> Design must be subservient to usability.

I really really like this quote. Did you come up with this? Hits the nail right on the head, and is actually a key to helping developers better understand how to design effectively. Namely, to come at design from the perspective of an interface as an 'information architecture'. And how this is key to making design easy and more understandable for a engineering oriented mind.

I wrote a short article about this here: https://simpleprogrammer.com/information-architecture-develo....

> Design must be subservient to usability.

Not OP, but it seems related to 'form follows function' [0]. Incidentally, my favourite graphic design rule is 'communicate don't decorate'.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function

> communicate don't decorate

Is another fantastic one.

I'm really getting into the idea that design is basically all about guidance. Mapping a goal-worthy journey for the user. Which is why we use words like 'journey' and 'story' often when describing UX issues.

Thanks for the comment and the link! Very enlightening.

Mentally, I add the prefix “communication” whenever I see references to (graphic) designers. It helps me keep what their ultimate responsibility should be in any software project: to communicate, as clearly as possible, within the chosen mediums of expression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_design

Ironically (as I'm sure you're aware), your comment is the perfect example of form follows function.

Maintaining this perspective of what designers are in function will probably lead to better designers (via the form of their work) overall.

Thanks for the link. Reading it now. Yes the quote is mine. Feel free to steal it. Cheers

On my iPhone it wasn’t just a bad experience in the viewport. It also fully blocked screen rotation for 4-5 seconds and made me think my phone had frozen. I only rotated because there was multicolumn text that was hard to read in portrait. The typography is very pleasing to the eye otherwise, but I get the sense it wasn’t even tested on a phone.

I'm not saying this to be ironic on purpose, but the design of this website makes it very hard for me to read.

- Oversized font which means I can't skim the article

- Sliding columns for seemingly no reason other than to confuse the reader (Also makes it impossible to skim the article)

- Really unintuitive navigation system (Click on a part of the paragraph) that I didn't find until I randomly hovered my mouse over it

I didn't read the article, the design and layout actively put me off, which is kind of a shame because I think the topic is interesting.

> Sliding columns for seemingly no reason other than to confuse the reader (Also makes it impossible to skim the article)

FWIW, every time I’ve looked at the state of the art for column flow content on web, this is how it’s felt. Even as browsers have supported it, even web design people barely talk about it because it’s basically bad.

Column flow content in design is managed and carefully laid out for the specific content. The idea that it could be a few css properties was hubris.

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