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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

HN could look much better without adding anything. You could spend endless hours tweaking alignment, margins, rhythm and typography.

HN's design currently delivers a solid performance and its content is great. Looking a bit strange to passersby is probably a good thing, I don't think HN's focus is attracting new people, especially new people who are only attracted by the visual design.

I have no idea why the visual design of Stack Overflow is called horrible. It's ok, not awesome but certainly ok.

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Maybe "horrible" is a little strong to talk about HN and SO. "Unappealing" would've been a better word. Stack Overflow especially barely has any styling.

By the way, in that section I was talking purely about visual design, i.e. styling, or "eye candy". I'm not debating the fact that both sites have great user experience (in fact that's specifically why I picked them as examples).

Hacker News’s visual design is just “boring” (though the lines of text that stretch all the way to the edge of wide windows with no space in between them are a pretty bad feature that could be trivially fixed), but I think “horrible” is an entirely fair description of Stack Overflow’s design. It’s claustrophobic and cluttered to the point of being nearly unreadable. Fortunately, the main use of Stack Overflow is arriving from Google, and the question and answer pages – after you scroll past the half-screen of cluttered headers – aren’t too unreasonable.

What you call eye candy, I call trendiness. To take the closest example: Attack Of Design looks lovely, but that background noisy pixel look is very 2010/2011.

Heh, I still got a couple months before it's out of date then!

I think you're right, trendiness does play a big role in style. And it's also true that complex designs generally get outdated faster than minimalist designs (see: 100% of Flash sites made between 2000 and 2005).

On the other hand, it's harder to brand minimalism. So like every design choice, it's a trade-off.

Well put. And I forgot to mention: thanks for the article! I especially like your definition of "feel", distinct from "look".

Visual design is a bit like fashion. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that (just as there is nothing wrong with fashion).

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